FLATHEAD BASICS

Flathead are ugly fish. When I was a kid fishing off the many jetties around Valentine, on Lake Macquarie, these brown bottom dwellers were highly prized catches for any jetty rat kid. We used to fish with frozen prawns catching bream, whiting and leatherjackets. When a flathead came along it was always a fish worth bragging about. My grandfather was a bit of a big flathead specialist at the time, and the many whoppers he caught over the years all had their heads nailed to the wall outside the chook shed. It was a trophy cabinet that I often gazed at in my childhood, hoping to one day emulate the feats of my grandfather. I’m not sure exactly how big some of these fish were, but there were a few heads almost as big as a shovel. Fish was a major food source for the families that lived on the lake, and catch and release was unknown at the time. As a keen young angler, flathead were the most highly prized fish in the lake. Over fifty years later I am still obsessed with chasing them.

The first flathead I ever caught on a lure ate a small spoon called a Wonder