Biggest MONSTER flathead you've seen/caught

[bdowdy]

nice fish breamnut.... congrats thats a ripper...

[cogswell]

Hooked a huge on standing on a shallow bank in the surf at Byron recently. Trouble was it was on a hard body [sx40] and as i was trying to net it it took off between my legs hooking the lower treble of the lure into the back of my heel and straightened the other hook getting away and leaving me hooked by the heel! Had to walk it 100m back to the shore to cut the hook/lure out of my heel.
Score: flathead = 1; me = 0

[PNG1M]

A few years back I was fishing from the beach with an old flame at Shark Bay, near Woody Head, Iluka (yes, a great place). We were catching shovel nose sharks mostly and they were becoming a nuisance as we wanted a feed of something decent.

Yeah you guessed it! I hooked what I thought was another shovel nose shark. It was about a metre long and I watched it come up the beach in shallow white-wash. I was in no rush, "Another one of those bloody shovel noses.." I was thinking.

As I casually sauntered over to do the hook removal bit, the thing started gunning it away from me in four inches of water. I became curious as it wasn't behaving like the other shovel nose sharks we'd caught.

Then as the whitewash subsided I saw that it was a monster flathead.

It was quite a powerful fish and I tried to pick it up. It must have had previous experience with anglers' hands and out manouvered my grappling. After a few attempts of holding my rod & reel clear of the salt water and trying to get a grip on the fish, the hooks finally pulled clear.

It was great to see the fish (that I would have released) powering away, back into deeper water to live another day.

Every shovel nose shark I caught from then on somehow looked like a flathead.

We did catch a couple of smaller flatties and a tailor or three that day, so we did get dinner too.



"...A voice in my head told me I had to go fishing..!"

[natho]

i KNOW bigger ones r females don't get too up set