Australian YouTuber Robbie Fishing has returned to a small inland creek he had not fished in a decade and walked away with a sobering snapshot of how much native fish numbers have shifted on private rural waterways - landing at least five Murray cod on 4 lb monofilament from a hole he used to know as a trout, redfin and blackfish stronghold.
"Today I'm just a little bit excited because I'm fishing in a spot that I used to love fishing, but I haven't been to for about 10 years," Robbie says at the top of the video. The farmer who lets him on the land had warned him the river had changed: "Now, the farmer that let me in tells me that all he ever sees in the creek now are carp." Robbie's expectation was modest - a carp or two, maybe a redfin if he was lucky, a Murray cod a long shot.
It did not play out that way. He hooked his first cod before he had even set the rod in the holder. "That all happened very, very quickly," he says, holding the small fish water-side and slipping it back without lifting it clear. Minutes later, a second cod hit a worm rig as it sank through the same hole. "That's another cod. This is the new cod hole. New cod creek. This is cod central."
A third cod followed while he was distracted, talking to the farmer up on the bank. By the time the session ended, Robbie had logged at least five Murray cod plus a handful of carp, all on 4 lb line, all from one private hole.
The biggest surprise was not the angler's. "I was just talking to the farmer, and even he's surprised," Robbie says. "He didn't know there was cod here. He lives, like, 50 m behind me, and he's lived there all his life, and he didn't even know that there was Murray cod in the creek. He does now, because I've caught them in front of him."
The footage will resonate with anglers tracking the slow but real recovery of Murray cod populations across inland New South Wales and Victoria. Hatchery stockings, closures during spawning season and tighter size and bag limits have lifted cod numbers in plenty of waterways previously written off as carp-only. Robbie's account suggests that recovery is now reaching small private creeks that have not been fished hard in years.
There were lessons in his tackle, too. "The reason I'm using really light line, in case you're wondering, is because I came up here hoping to catch a redfin or a blackfish," he explained while wrestling a cod that bottomed his weepy rod. "There's not one line fits all when you've got blackfish that are so small and carp that are so big." By the closing minutes - a fish of similar size to the carp earlier in the day, but pulling much harder - he was prepared to call it. "It's a cod. And quite a nice one at that."
The sign-off doubled as a quiet conservation note. "It's amazing just how much the fishing has changed here in this creek over the last 10 years," Robbie says. "It's basically infested with Murray cod. I'm not going to say that's a bad thing."