I was doing a sunset session with my crew last year when I got this fish on my surface pattern, a NoseJob. It was already dark, and getting late when MC suggested that it’s time for lighting the fire and a glass of red wine.  Up to that point, it was also very quiet, with no kob revealing themselves by eating mullet off the surface as they sometimes do.

I decided to stay another 15 minutes or so, and then walk back to the cabin. A South Easter was blowing and I was halfway through making a reverse cast, when, with my back to the water, I heard a loud ‘BOOF!’ right behind me. I got such a fright – or – I was so startled by it, that I dropped the cast and landed my fly in the bushes nearby. After retrieving my fly line and fly from the nearby vegetation, I relaunched the floating line and put a cast in the direction from where I heard the surface take coming from. (When kob hunt and suck mullet from the surface by means of gill chamber expansion, it makes a distinct ‘boof’ sound.)

I picked up the slack and after two slow pulls, there was another load ‘boof’. I felt the take, set the hook and the fish took off. It was landed, kept in shallow water as I set up my camera and self-timer, photographed and released. How anglers kill fish like these in our estuaries is beyond me.

The victory when I joined the crew around the campfire was sweet; fishing for kob with surface flies and floating lines is as good as it gets.