The weather window was barely big enough to drive into. Victorian angler Mitchy had spent weeks watching cold fronts roll over Vic, and on the first clear morning he punted east into East Gippsland with a kayak, a small box of hard bodies and a few baby shads. By the time the wind picked back up at lunchtime he had bagged about a dozen estuary perch — and one chunky high-40 cm fish that decided, late in the session, to crunch a Flash Minnow on the pause.
"Today I've sort of made the boot up the coast into East Gippsland and I haven't been up here for quite some time," he said. "I'll be looking around the bottom section of the system, near the front, looking for whatever — bream, perch, maybe the odd flatty."
He set up on a 1.3-metre flat with a soft drop-off about eight to ten metres off the bank. Side imaging was lighting up almost immediately with what looked like a roving school of small bream and perch slowly working past. The first cast with a Lucky Craft Flash Minnow in Ghost Sayori — a tiny hard-bodied jerkbait that dives a fraction under the surface — hit on the fifth or sixth cast. "That's a fish. Didn't take long. What's that, five casts in?" he said.
The pattern was set instantly. Sharp, erratic twitches followed by two- or three-second dead pauses produced almost every bite. "Just twitching that lure pretty erratically," he said. "And then a pause. And then a pause is the key."
With the Flash Minnow only diving so far, Mitchy switched to a Z-Man Baby Shad in his go-to peacock-bass colour to reach the slightly deeper fish hanging just off the drop-off. The first cast pinned a perch "good" inside the cheek; the second drift got cleaned up on the pause when something bigger hit and snapped him off — even on ten-pound fluorocarbon. "Even ten-pound FC rock on fish like this, they can go through it like a hot knife in butter," he said. "Those gill rakers are super sharp."
The better fish came an hour or so in, after the flat had thinned out into the typical mid-30 cm school size. Mitchy was casting up the line where the side imaging was painting fish, ran a Flash Minnow back through, and felt a heavier head shake on the pause. "He boiled up. I'm just going easy now. Back the drag off," he said as the perch pulled into the timber. "Yeah, he's a good one. He's a real good fish."
The net measurement put it at mid-to-high 40 cm, possibly 48 cm. "He is fat," Mitchy said. "Look at the guts on him." The hook-up was textbook for the soft-twitch retrieve — a single treble pinned cleanly in the corner of the jaw, no lost barbs, no tangled trebles. "Just been going through those little fish, those mid-30s sort of size fish," he said. "And then this one come along and clunked the Flash Minnow."
The storm-window arithmetic ended the session on plan. "Wind's picking up now," he said as the front edge of the next system rolled overhead. "Later on today it's supposed to thunderstorm and we're getting 15 to 20 mil of rain. That's why I've shot out of here now because it's probably going to be the last chance we'll get for a week or so."
The takeaways from a two-and-a-half-hour winter session were cleanly transferable. Match the lure to the depth — a shallow Flash Minnow over the inner edge, a Baby Shad along the drop. Cast up the line where the sounder is showing fish, not at the bank. And on the pause, stay still: the bigger fish in this system clearly responded to a dead lure in deeper water, not constant action.