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Healey goes back to back at Mallacoota

We have seen plenty of hot-streaks at ABT over the last 25 years. Anglers get on a roll and good decisions lead to more good decisions. Not many, though, have matched Mark Healey’s run over the last 12 months.

He won in 2023 at Hawkesbury and Lake Macquarie and after a third in the Grand Final at Port Stephens, has followed it up with wins in the first two season openers in 2024 in Victoria, proving himself a truly versatile tournament angler across both black and yellowfin bream.

His Mallacoota win was unique in that it came from a single, 30m stretch of water that had fish passing through it constantly, right down near the entrance of the system.

This is how he capitalised on that spot.

“I caught 5 bream in 5 casts at the spot in practice, but I was sharing the water with another angler. We discussed it and agreed to share the spot,” Mark explained.

It was the back of a bank where the water would drop into after entering the system at the bar and the yellowfin bream were lined up there during the rising tide for most of the session.

“When I got there, Cam (Whittam) already had landed a couple of fish and for the first part of the session, he caught fish every cast. As the tide changed, though, it seems that a run of bigger bream came past where I was fishing and I was able to upgrade most of what I had recorded. It was crazy,” he said.

Indeed. In a couple of hours of fishing, Mark had caught more bream than he had in the entire Gippsland event campaign.

He used several techniques to keep the fish biting, often changing as the bite slowed down. Showing them something new would turn them back on again.

Mark rotated between a Cranka crab (heavy, olive), an Ecogear blade (40mm, colour 426) and a Jackall Chubby deep in brown Suji.

He’d use the blade to get the lure to the bottom quickly when the tide was at its peak velocity, the crankbait when it got deep enough to roll over the shallows and into the deeper channel and the crab when the current slowed down and a little more finesse was needed.

The icing on the cake was a couple of last minute upgrades on Goodwin Sands - a 37.5 and 39cm yellowfin. That elevated his bag to over 6kg and gave him a solid lead on the rest of the field.

After boxing around 50 bream on Day 1, Healey said the bite slowed down a lot on Day 2, with about 20 bream hitting the deck. One of these, however, was the Maui Jim Big BREAM of the event. The 40cm fork yellowfin ate the Cranka Crab.

He fished the baits on a variety of Shimano outfits - the heaviest of which was a G Loomis heavy rod that he’d usually use in the racks paired with a Shimano reel, 6lb Kairiki braid and 6lb (Saturday) and 4lb (Sunday) Ocea fluorocarbon leader.

Leading the BREAM Angler of the Year points race with a perfect 200/200 score, Healey has made the last minute decision to do the Tasmanian leg of the Daiwa BREAM Series to try and maximise his chance of winning that accolade for the first time.

MARIO BEST OF THE REST

Veteran Victorian BREAMer Mario Vukic Was the best of the rest of the field and targeted black bream in the Bottom Lake to amass most of his weight. He took it pretty easy on the practice day and identified some key spots in the deep and shallow water.

Vukic started shallow and bagged out early by throwing a Hurricane Sprat on a 1/20oz TT HWS jighead. After that, he rotated several shallow spots to upgrade a couple of times, but it was a final-hour flurry in deeper water where he made three, key upgrades to finish with just under 5kg for the session.

The flurry was in deeper water on a a Zman grub in Motor Oil on a TT jighead.

“My non-boater Matt Perry and I put on a Motor Oil and a Bloodworm Grub to see what the fish preferred, and after Matt landed three in a row on the Motor Oil, we both then threw it to good effect,” Mario explained.

By the end of that flurry, he’d added a 36 and 35cm black bream to the tally.

He threw the grub on a G Loomis GLX TSR842-2 matched with a Daiwa Exist 2500 reel, 16lb Sunline Castaway braid (1.0 PE) and a 4lb Sunline VHard leader.

“My first big fish bit as I was untangling a wind knot, so that told me that I had to slow down the retrieve a little to get the fish to bite,” he continued.

Mario tried to repeat the success of  Day One on the Sunday and the fish weren’t shallow like they were the day before. Half way through the session he had scratched a mid-3kg limit together and noted that he was sitting in second place on the live scoreboards.

He then went to a deep spot in 16 feet of water and pinned three, 35cm fish in a row on the Zman grubs, elevating his limit to 4.5kg and holding off challenged from Crompton and Hodges.

It was a solid finish from an angler who has won at this venue in the past.

ALLAN TAKES TROPHY THIRD TRY

Liam Allan had only fished two ABT events before taking the win the third time. One was the Gippsland event just days before and the other, the Mallacoota 2023 iteration. Living in Canberra now, Liam used to live an hour up the road in Merimbula and although he doesn’t consider Mallacoota his ‘local’, he’s pretty comfortable fishing there.

After boxing 3/3, 2.529kg with Peter Breukel, he bagged another 3/3, 2.640kg with Nathan Booth to steal the win by over 100g from Judd Kirkland.

Allan’s weapon of choice for the weekend was a Millerod Grub Freak Lt that he paired with a Daiwa reel, 6lb 8-strand braid and 2-3 rod lengths of 4 or 6lb fluorocarbon leader. On the end he usually had tied a Hurricane Sprat rigged on a 1/20oz TT HWS jighead.

“The prawns are running at the moment and that bait looks and swims just like a prawn and that rod has the backbone to set that tingle jighead hook,” Liam explained.

With instant qualification to the Daiwa BREAM Series Grand Final on Lake Macquarie later in the year, Liam is pretty keen to see if his Sprats are the go up there. He’s never seen the lake ever before.

“I’m sure I’ll get paired with some guys in fast boats that know what they’re doing,” Liam concluded.

“It’s the Grand Final, mate, they’re not there by accident,” Steve Morgan said at the interview.