Doing Your Cod Homework

Murray cod are one of the most perplexing species that swims. They can be like your larrikin best mate one day and a cold, bitchy ex-girlfriend, the next.

Having dedicated most of my angling energy chasing these fish, means I’ve amassed a war chest of unexplainable stories. From catching zero cod at the Lachlan River at Hillston in NSW before lunchtime, to landing a jaw-dropping 28 – yes 28 – between three anglers, for the afternoon session.

Or the time we fished for a day-and-a-half on the ‘Bidgee for not even a touch, before arcing into a double hook up of metre beating green from the same stretch.

It is like a proverbial switch gets flicked and the cod go on, or off, the chew. But, while there is not enough research to definitively provide a casual link between cod activity and environmental factors, the weight of anecdotal angler info is growing.  

The most commonly explored environmental factors include:

Also, the type of waterway and its location – i.e small river, big dam, high alpine lake, slow stream- can influence how environmental factors impact a cod’s feeding habits.

You then layer time of year over the top and quickly realise the ideal cod blueprint becomes quite complex.

But, rather than waiting for a legitimate research led investigation go find a silver bullet for each waterway, anglers should be keeping their own cod diary this season. What you monitor is up to you, but the above-mentioned list, while exhaustive, is a pretty good start.

Use either you phone or an old-school diary to jot down the results, both good and bad, from every trip. Paying special attention to the exact time when you land a fish.

Yes, it can become frantic during a hot bite, but if you, at the very least, note the time of each fish you can then go back retrospectively and work out the environmental factors, after the fact.

To do this, I use the Fish Ranger website and APP, which is one of the best weather tools on the market. It gives you wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, air temperature, moon phase, rainfall, cloud cover, moonrise and set, sunrise and set and solar noon.

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You can even record your cod captures direct on the APP in the ‘Log Book’ tab, where you can backdate and record how you fared at a specific location and its date/time.

If you then go back and review your previous trips you can start to find patterns, like, for example, Murray cod tend to bite better at Burrinjuck either side of a directly with a NE wind blowing. So, if we are feeling like getting off the water at 11:00pm and moonrise is at 11:35pm, we’ll stretch the session a little longer and play the cod odds.

I’ll admit I was never one for homework at school, but doing my cod coursework after every trip, while a little tedious, has helped us maximise our time on the water and catch more fish.

Oh, and in retrospect that fateful summer afternoon flogging the banks of the Lachlan river for a footy score of cod coincided with a huge spike in barometric pressure from 1009 to 1032, in a four-hour period.