Taking a gap between storms and toddlers, Tudor Caradoc-Davies goes deep into the backwoods of New South Wales in search of Murray cod with Aussie Fly Fisher (aussieflyfisher.com).

“Cod thumb, it’s a rite of passage mate.”

I was standing in the middle of a long, dark pool on a heavily-wooded, mid-sized river in the hills of New South Wales, Australia, with my thumb inside a Murray cod’s mouth, while Josh Hutchins of Aussie Fly Fisher, who caught that particular fish, was taking photos. Josh was excited about the soft, late afternoon light but, at the same time there was no denying that he was enjoying the grimace on my face as the cod’s raspy tongue and pads of needle-sharp teeth shredded my thumb. Somewhere off in the woods to the right I could hear the bleating of a feral goat, a noise that in the moment sounded awfully like a laugh.

Josh is classically Aussie in that he is all about the banter, mate. And, with me being South African (a nation that traditionally competes well at sportsball with Australia, but generally loses the sledging wars), I carry a small pouch of national trauma everywhere I go. Think Shane Warne running psychological rings around Darryl Cullinan; the Clyde Rathbone/Tiaan Strauss/Kepler Wessels defections and the 2011 Rugby World Cup quarter-final. That’s why when Josh insisted that you have to lip cod with your thumb, I wasn’t sure if he was taking the piss or not. He’d already tried baiting me with chirps about South Africa’s “yellow carp” (aka our beloved yellowfish species), so I had him pigeonholed as being full of it.

Pretending it was all in a day’s work, I did as I was told and lipped cod when instructed, both Josh’s and mine, and soon had raw bleeding thumbs that looked like they had lost a fight with a belt sander. Still, despite feeling like Satan’s proctologist, it would not be an overstatement to say I was in a state of deep bliss. You know that feeling that only seems to set in when you are several hours into a trip? Where you are tired, but in a good physical way, not stressy tired; with a fish on the board; and a cell phone deep in my pack that could not receive any comms even if it had been switched on.

Plus, the only arse I’d wiped in the last 24 hours was my own.

Rewind six months to 11 000km away in my home town of Cape Town, South Africa. I was stalking my way, like a big game hunter, down the corridor of our house, tracking two predators of a different sort.

Like when you arrive three minutes after a pack of aquatic pit bulls have massacred a school of defenseless baitfish, there were obvious signs of destruction and mayhem. Three dummies (one with a hole chewed in it), a soaking wet teddy that may or may not have been dunked in a toilet bowl, a selection of spoons taken from a drawer in the kitchen, and every Tupperware we own, strategically strewn like boulders through a shallow run. All senses alert to my quarry, I stepped nimbly past a brightly-coloured xylophone and through a minefield of Tupperware lids into the nursery… only to put my foot through what felt like a Duplo block but could have been another pointy object designed to eviscerate bare feet. I screamed like Jako Lucas holding a GT and bit my fist as a mouth-foaming fanagalo of at least five languages erupted within. Limping and off-kilter, I stepped left onto a squeaky rubber duck liberated from the bathtub, then right onto something wet that squelched between my toes before my foot slipped out from under me onto a Julia Donaldson book. I staggered backwards over a prone pink plastic motorbike and then landed on (and broke) a puzzle with my butt while also taking out a miniature blackboard with my arm. Activated in the fall, a doll with a robotic heart button like a candy floss Iron Man declared, “I love the ABCs.”

As I lay there for a moment, I imagined the Tudor of my teens, twenties and thirties floating up above me like ghostly E.R doctors, tutting and conferring.

“Time of death?”
“Sunday May 12th, 10:58.”
“Cause?”
“Toddlers. Two of them.”

You see, to use the technical term other parents use, my wife and I are currently “in the trenches” with our 2-year-old twins. People have offered accurate yet largely unhelpful platitudes like, “you’ll miss this stage when it’s gone” and “the days are long, but the years are short”. These offerings are well-meant and so far true. A) I already miss some of the stages that have passed. B) Somehow the last two years have flown but also gone exceptionally slowly. Show me a slow glacial winter’s day with the rain bucketing down outside and two hyper-active toddlers rampaging through the house and I will sell you front row seats to the formation of fossil fuels in real time.

I’m not going to bang on about how much I love my girls and how utterly positively life-changing the whole experience has been, because no one really wants to hear that (those who already know know and those who don’t, don’t care…understandably). But what I do want to get to grips with is how parenthood completely changes your relationship with time. And of course, in the context of a fly fishing magazine editor, fishing time.

I used to casually suggest fishing to friends and then just go with nary a care in the world. I laugh at that guy now as weeks in advance of a possible gap I work, prep and hustle and that’s all before I even double-check my wife’s schedule, the weather, the traffic, fishing buddy availability and other variables before possibly shooting out for a half-day session.

The other way it’s impacted on time is my long-term management of it. Every few years we need to visit the in-laws in Australia as we did at the end of last year. That’s how, six months in advance of getting to Australia, I got in touch with Josh who kindly secured trips for me to go fishing for trout in Tasmania and to join him for Murray cod in New South Wales. While lying on the floor of the nursery gathering my wits and my will to live, my phone pinged with a message from him confirming the dates.

I did the trout trip (utterly epic, see Issue 49), but it was the allure of the indigenous cod that I’d pre-ordained as the potential highlight of my time in Australia. But as I was gearing up for the cod trip, the entire east coast of Australia was hit by massive flooding. You know, footage of bogans paddling between homes on surfboards and weather reports on TV with maps covered in brightly coloured lava lamp eruptions as system after system smashed into New South Wales and Queensland. Josh and I ping-ponged messages for a while as he kept an eye on the floods. A gap around Christmas was proposed as a back-up, but that was going to prove a hard sell for all parties with festive season family commitments. The trip was starting to look like it was going to be called off (the original idea of a combined float+heli trip was definitely off), but then Josh scanned his weather apps and found what he thought might be a window between storm systems. A window that would only last two, three days max and that would only apply to one tributary of the Murray-Darling River system that Josh knew from experience behaved differently due to something mysterious in its drainage and the general hydrology of that clump of hills.

It’s a little over 1 000km from Warrnambool, Victoria where my in-laws live to Bathurst, New South Wales where I was to meet Josh and fellow guide Rowan Robinson. That’s a long way to drive for a two-day fishing experience, but flying (complete with the train+bus+transit time) was going to take roughly the same amount of time) and I wanted to see a bit of the countryside. Even though Australian highway speeds are painfully slow, anticipation and good podcasts made the two-day journey via towns with delightful names like like Wagga Wagga, Wombat and Cootamundra (Donald Bradman’s home town) whizz by.

On arrival there was a Bathurst supermarket rendezvous in the cold cut section, a drive out to Josh’s family cabin, the transferral of my clobber from my mother-in-law’s small Suzuki to Josh’s Landcruiser and a final drive to the farm with access to the unnamed river. There we left a votive offering of two cases of beer in a deserted barn (to future-proof the farmer’s favour), then turned off the jeep track and into some heavy 4×4 territory before finally making camp on a rise above a bend in the river.

Rigging up a 9-weight with large flies when the river before you is the size of a trout stream felt a little weird but Murray cod, the apex predator of this system, can grow to massive sizes. The largest freshwater fish on the continent, despite being called a cod (like so many other disparate species globally), Murray cod or Goodoo in the local language, sit in their own family, Percichthyidae, along with other large, rare indigenous Australian fish. Cod moniker aside, they are very bassish in looks and in some behaviours, like their propensity to smash surface flies in the late afternoons and early mornings.

While Rowan and Josh had large, gaudy streamers and poppers, foam frogs and deer hair bugs tied specifically for cod, when I opened my fly box containing beasts, tarpon flies and other odd creations shoplifted from Andre van Wyk of Beast Flies, they didn’t poo-poo what they saw. It turns out, cod aren’t too picky and tarpon flies are as good as cod-specific patterns. You just need something with movement that either makes a commotion on the surface or pushes water below it.

“You really want to work that far edge, in amongst the sunken logs and the rocks.”

I’m a bit over 6 foot and was already up to my nipples, throwing wobbly casts while my pack floated up behind me. Josh looks closer to 7-foot, and with his full beard he sports the air of an NBA hillbilly, but he was working that far edge better than I was. I put it down to the height advantage and the fact that while I’ve been desk-bound, he’d just spent a season guiding in the salt of Aussie Fly Fisher’s Wessel Islands and Cape York operations.

As their mouths might suggest, these fish are ambush predators. Fishing the margins of wider pools where sub-surface rocks were just visible, on Josh’s recommendation I tried to give the flies a moment to sink into ambush territory. Moving up into an unlikely looking narrower run, my fly was smashed by a small cod, which then promptly and somewhat surprisingly gave up the fight. That is until I put my thumb in its mouth. With stunning spotty markings, white-tipped fins, a wide leery mouth and bad attitude bouncer eyes, these fish are at once pretty and ugly, like if Jabba the Hutt banged a mermaid and spawned a species.

By the time we hiked back into camp that first evening after adding on a short surface fly session, we each had fish on the board. Judging by Rowan and Josh’s reactions, perhaps on account of the changeable weather, but more likely the general odds of group success with this species, this was already a successful trip. I got the sense that for everyone to catch cod in one session is like everyone catching Clanwilliam yellowfish. When it comes to tricky indigenous species this was a good return.

If the weather held overnight, we’d get one more full day. As thunderstorms threatened overhead, we laid out the swag tents and prepped chow. Steak and broccoli dinner, washed down by gin and tonics, the three of us, all with young kids, compared notes about wrangling sprogs, fishing, and then, for possibly the first time ever on the first night of a fishing trip (at least for me), we all turned in. I lay awake for a short while listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the Australian bush, but slept fitfully as the rain fell.

The river was up in the morning, but the clarity (Josh and Rowan’s main concern), was still okay enough to try. The plan was to walk downstream as far as we could while fishing, break for lunch and fish our way back before heavier predicted rain hit the valleys and our window slammed shut.

Initially, I thought it was a pity I hadn’t brought along a 6-weight for the carp in this river, because they were big and plentiful. And, considering I could wade in pretty close to them in the back eddies and tail outs, they looked gullible enough to take a fly. In retrospect I think it was a good thing, because with carp as an option I am likely to have made at least 300 fewer casts at Murray cod and there’s a good chance I would only have carp to show for making the journey there. I love carp, but I can catch them at home. Still, having them swim around the margins kept the adrenalin flowing, because for every 40 carp spotted, there’d be a sighting of a cod.

As pressure systems built in the sky and the humidity shot through the roof, we worked our way downstream, fishing the heads, tailouts, and structured margins, all the while Josh pointing out spots where he’s previously caught fish. We criss-crossed the river for better vantage points and access. At one point a seriously old stone road ran alongside, apparently built by indentured Chinese labourers during the area’s gold rush era.

As a South African, I have always felt a daft rivalry with Australia when it comes to our animals. Australia has historically had closer relations with the USA, and Ozzie films and TV shows like Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin (aka The Crocodile Hunter) have helped push the US’s hegemonic cultural narrative that ‘in Australia, everything is trying to kill you’. Having spent two months on the trot there, I can state that that is categorically not true, especially in the more heavily populated south-east, where you’re more likely to get killed by a burning hot flat white or die of boredom reading the warning signs on everything. The competitive seven-year-old in me kept thinking, “Our animals want to kill you more!” We have crocs like them (ok, their salties up north are more hardcore); we have sharks like them (Bulls, Tigers and Great Whites) and snakes too (our Black Mambas and cobras = more hardcore). But… we also have massive herbivores that can crush you and large carnivores that’ll chew your limbs off if given half a chance.

So, deep in that valley, even after watching a red-bellied black snake swim the river, I felt pretty blasé about the threat from fauna. Scan the hills and you do not think about what sees you as prey. There were lizards aplenty, tons of feral goats and various wallaroos, wallabies, kangaroos etc too. What actually seemed like a much bigger threat was the heat, the intense humidity and the fact that I’d powered through my water a kilometre or two back.

We broke for lunch with only Rowan having a cod to show for the morning’s efforts. While we swam, Josh and Rowan educated me on the fact that the directors behind cult movie The Castle, Rob Stich and Tom Gleisner, are also avid fly anglers who had a comedic catch-and-cook fly fishing TV series called A River Somewhere in the late 90s.

Rejuvenated, and with water bottles refilled thanks to a handy MSR filter Josh was carrying, we turned back towards camp and began re-working the water we had just fished. In the sky dodging around skinny trees on the highest hills, two crows and a massive wedge tail eagle were engaged in a dog fight. It felt like a portend of violence to come.

At the head of a slow deep pool, on about the 20th cast at a specific cluster of boulders my tarpon toad got hit by something considerably bigger than any of the knocks I’d had thus far. Judging by the leaden head shakes and the bend in the rod, this was a much heavier specimen than the fish from the previous day. Josh and Rowan came running with the net only for the line to go slack after about a minute’s fight as I tried to get the fish on the reel. I wager I am the first person in history to swear in colourful Kaapse Afrikaans on that specific pool.

Working any bit of structure I could find from sunken log piles to submerged boulders and grassy islands in the stream, as we approached the last stretch heading back to camp we intensified our efforts. By now Josh had also caught a Murray cod, plus a yellow belly (aka Golden Perch). As thunderclouds formed overhead and it began to spit with rain I was starting to get a little despondent as the only blank angler in the crew. With my back cast threaded through a gap between two trees, I was casting diagonally along the edge at the end of the last massive pool. I was zoned in, enjoying making the black and purple tarpon fly emerge from the darkness of the main drop off and dart nervously across several shallow shattered rock shelves, when a cod rocketed out of what felt like nowhere but must have been a crevice in the shelf. It smashed the fly in the most glorious cinematic swoop of bubbly chemtrails and emphatic predatory power then turned for deep water. After a good fight, it felt like an honour to offer it my thumb. I couldn’t have scripted a better ending, so with camp in sight and heavier rain coming down, I broke down my rod and finished off on a high.

We packed up in the rain and made our way to the Hutchins’s family cabin on the top of a hill a few valleys away. After hot showers, cold beverages and a braai/BBQ we watched lightning illuminate the hills we’d just been fishing as huge storms rolled in. In the morning, we checked out one last section of river, but it was fully in spate. Even as I set off on my two-day drive back to Victoria, massive rains lashed the roads for the first five hours until I finally outran the systems.

As I walked in the door at my in-laws’ house, in her excitement one of my toddlers kicked me in the nuts so I sat down at the dining room table to recover. There, someone had laid out a regional newspaper on a spread where some local angler had caught a record cod, a monstrous fish at least seven times the size of the cod I caught. I couldn’t help but wonder if Josh would actually thumb that thing or not.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I would not have thought twice about driving a 1 000km to catch a couple of fish for two nights and then turn around and drive home. Twin parenting upended that way of being for a few years, but this trip showed me that in many ways, I’m still 100% that guy. I just need a window.

This article about fly fishing for Murray cod first appeared in The Mission Issue 50. Read the whole issue below, for free.