Got the chance on sunday morning to take it on it's maiden voyage. Went out to the Pimapama River ( on the way to gold coast ) and did some fishing.
I took turns paddling and sitting back with the leccy running, trolling an sx40 behind me. I didn't catch anything trolling and so I pulled up at a spot where a little creek runs off. Because the tide was running pretty fast I figured it would be a good spot for the fish to hide. Dug my oar into the sand ( pretty shallow ) for an anchor and got ready for casting.
First cast in with my sx40 ( I bought it a few days ago, never used one before ) and up comes a smallish bream. A quick Happy snap and back in it went.
A few casts later the sx40 was smashed. my drag immediately started screaming, and so did I
. After an excellent fight with some really decent runs I managed to net and land my PB flathead! It was big and slippery and hard to measure, but it was obviously less than 70cm, and I decided that flatty for lunch tomorrow sounds good, so I threw him in the esky after some shonky camera work.
After this it went dead, so I pottered around for a bit and pulled up to some sand banks near the boat ramp ( low tide ) and tossed around some plastics, got a few hits on some camo craws ( gulp brad soft plastic lures ) but no hookups.
Got home and cleaned and filleted the flatty, finally mastering the flatty filleting to get two boneless fillets out of him.
It was bent up and not wanting to go straight so I filleted it before measuring again properly, got 62cm. Oh I weighed it in at 1.42kg as well.
Both fish were caught on an sx40 on 6pd braid, 12pd fluro leader, on a 7'2 2-4kg sikstik with 2500 Shimano sedona reel.