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When we left The Australian Freshwater Masters last issue Boothy and Banksy were just over half a Murray cod behind the leaders , sitting in fifth position and keen to get at the cod of Lake Mulwala .
The Mulwala round for Team Venom was the do or die round with the team 370 points ( 37cm ) behind the leaders . With the minimum legal size for Murray cod being 55cm ( 550 points ), all the team really had to do was catch one more legal fish than the other competitors in the field to take out the overall win .
We ’ ll hand over to Boothy to tell the tale .
We had a plan all tournament for all three rounds , a set of KPIs ( Key Performance Indicators ) for want of a better way of saying it . We ’ d performed above what Shane thought we might need at Round 1 and Round 2 and he said 6 legal cod will get us in the mix , 7 would be better . So with this in mind we spent way too much time thinking about what we should do come Round 3 tournament time .
Prefish day was tough as we scouted around looking for likely areas to fish . With a 7½ hour session on day one and a 10 hour session on day two , there was plenty of time to get legal cod and we needed a number of areas to fish and fill the time while we ‘ rested ’ the better areas .
We fished the middle to top reaches of the lake scouting out flats and backwaters hoping to find an area where fish were congregating and feeding . We did come across a few likely areas , but a lot of areas I like to fish were killed off by rampant weed growth that had snot-like weed over the top of it .
The heavy weed is not a problem as you can pocket fish and laneway fish , but when there are large amounts of the fine filamentous snot weed floating around the weed and all over it , your lures clog up almost instantly , making the area unfishable .
The prefish day , in terms of fish , was an absolute wash out , but we did leave areas I knew had fish alone , choosing not to risk stinging them and scaring them off for the tournament days . In fact I was pretty happy that a lot of areas were unfishable as it reduced the area to concentrate on in the comp .
Day 1 of the tournament arrived and we set off from the ramp . The wind was blowing a good 20 knots and the lake was a bit messy and our decision to head upstream was easy to make . But just as we headed to the first corner after the ramp we spied a wakeboat deep in the snags with the two
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