Some good beach species were caught using soft plastics with plenty of smaller school mulloway, salmon and tailor and some quite big flathead sitting right in close to the shore.

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Following on from numerous past press releases and ideas put forward from just about everybody, there has been a very successful trial done using a “William’s” carp separation cage on the Murray River at Torumbarry Weir.

We all are aware the introduced European carp is one the world’s most destructive invasive species that has had severe and significant negative impacts on water quality, aquatic plants and native fauna not only here in Australia but across many other countries.   

The Williams’ carp separation cage exploits the escape behaviour of carp in that they jump out of the water when they are trapped in a fish way whereas native fish typically don’t jump to the same extent.   The cage successfully traps the jumping carp and allows for easy removal.

Data released shows that the single Torumbarry Weir cage resulted in the removal of 723 tonnes of carp in a near 10-year period up to 2018 or approximately 5000 kilos of carp daily in their peak migration periods.

There is still very wide support for the herpes virus release, but the environmental impact of a mass fish kill, some estimate to be many thousands of tonnes in a very short period, has those supporters looking hard at the cage method.