Sending it on blind reconnaissance is a recurring item on Colby Lesko's annual Murray cod calendar, and his latest western-rivers mission is a clean illustration of why the strategy hurts before it pays. Five days, two unfamiliar systems, more wind than a freshwater angler should reasonably have to endure, and one very honest conclusion about January as a Murray cod month.
The trip started with no prior intel. "I've got no idea what's going to happen. Nobody's been fishing these spots I want to go fish. I don't know what the water looks like. The flows look okay. So I'm just sending it," Lesko said on the drive west.
The first river was a dud. Less than a foot of clarity, gale-force wind that even disrupted his drone, and not a single touch on the spinnerbait or trimmer he worked through deep snags into the evening. A pre-dawn return on the same water yielded the same: nothing on the boards and a fellow boatie confirming no surface hits along the bank.
Lesko cut his losses and drove hours to a second system. The water was clearer there but the bite was still locked up. Two full sessions of casting hard bodies into shaded snags returned a single eat. "Finally got a fish in the boat," he said as he lifted a small cod off a snag in the heat of the afternoon. His mate Riley hooked up on a spinnerbait moments later, prompting the line every cod angler wants to deliver: "The floodgates are open. Here we go."
The surge lasted minutes. A handful of small cod, several missed surface hits over the next two evenings, one buff into the air on Lesko's trimmer, and a single eat on Riley's Ballista humpback that came off boatside. "Probably a 70 cm one, I reckon," Lesko called.
His post-mortem leaned on the calendar rather than the gear. The combo - a Samaki S12 732 BHMF with a Zing 300 baitcaster, 50 lb braid and 60 lb leader - was the same all-rounder he uses to clean up in cooler months. The variable, he says, was the timing. "It's January. I don't really like January or February. They're really high irrigation months, so that's when you get that dirtier water coming down from up higher due to the high flows. They generally switch the irrigation off about the 15th of May. That's when you get the really clear lower level of water."
The key date for anyone planning a 2026 western Murray cod assault is 15 May. That is when, by Lesko's reckoning, the irrigation taps close, the systems start to clear and the cod start to behave. His own template is to scout in January and February when nothing else is working, then come back when conditions stabilise. "Sometimes that means really good fishing. So it's all just part of it."
The broader point is reassuring for anyone who has had a recent dud cod trip out west. "Definitely a tougher trip," Lesko said. "We did still catch some fish but not the size we really wanted, but that's just the way it goes out west here. You either get on them and it's really good or sometimes you have trips like this and it's tough and you don't get on them, but it's all part of it."