A word from mid field: Jamie Douglas

 The GCSFC’s Top Gun Flathead comp has been run and won, and what a great day it was!

With the Flathead Classic looming in the not to distant future, we decided to use this one as a bit of a ‘reccie’. Stuey and I have recruited a third body to join us in this years Flattie Classic, a complete newbie, Pommie Chris, who had never fished for Flatties before, hell, he doesn’t even own a rod! So we thought what a great opportunity to get him in the boat and fish three up for the first time and see how we go, we weren’t expecting much, just hoping one of us wouldn’t finish the day with a new body piercing! We rocked up to a glorious Gold Coast morning and a great turn out, we made the decision days before to only fish the Southern end and Nerang River and to give Chris as much casting practice as possible, completely ruled out trolling, something that probably hurt our chances as all the fish over 70cm I heard about were caught on the troll. As it turned out, Chris is a natural, we’ve renamed him the “English Assassin”, started the day as pretty much a fishing virgin but ended the day adding 3 species to his list and bagged 1 of our top 5 Flatties. We managed our bag of 5 legal fish within the first hour and a half and were confident of some upgrades but to no avail, we found the River was the ‘Flathead Nursery’ as we must have caught 15 fish under 40cm, along with a couple of nice Trevally, a Tailor and Stu got a horse of a Luderick on a Zman Holographic ShrimpZ that went like a train in 2 feet of water, and proved to be no fluke as I managed a smaller model later the day, it appears the humble Luderick has a hankering for Zman’s! The lure of the day turned out to be the Zman StreakZ 4” Curly Tail in Motor Oil which just happened to be tied to the end of my line, LOL. It will be my first go to lure come Classic time, no doubt! It turned out to be a fairly tough day and the comp was very tight, to give you an idea, if we had of got one 75cm fish we’d have jumped from 17th to 9th! However, I have absolutely no doubt that our team won the “who had the best laugh” part of the competition, we had an absolute blast. We never take ourselves too seriously, only seriously enjoy ourselves. Hats of to Danny and the GCSFC team for yet another seamless comp, extremely well organised but still with that casual appeal and friendliness that some of the bigger comps lack, we’ll be back, Cheers. J