Episode 95: Lake Borumba Bass With Keeghan Painter

Keeghan’s Top Tips For Borumba Bass

• Don’t be in too much of a rush to wet a line. Slow down and spend some time finding fish and cracking the pattern to maximise your chances once you do start fishing.
• Don’t ignore the ugly or boring looking banks. Often these can hold some good fish but most anglers go straight past them. Do some research and use your C-Maps or Google Earth images to find likely spots to start looking for fish
• Lake Borumba is a great shoreline fishery all year around, with fish often along the edges in shallow water.
• Don’t always go looking for large schools of fish. Sometimes you’ll see two or three fish on the sounder and if you slow down and wait others will appear.
• At different times of year, bass will hang on different types of structure. Old creek beds and the flats beside those creek beds are usually a good place to start sounding around, as are points and weed beds.
• Key spots in Borumba Dam include the first buoys near the boat ramp usually holds plenty of small to medium fish. Use C-Map to find a large hump in the middle of the lake around 8ft deep – This is actually a giant weed bed that holds quality fish. The wooded areas at the back of the lake are always worth a look and there’s always the possibility of a toga by-catch.
• Borumba fishes best in winter for bigger fish, but heavy rain periods in the summer time usually result in hot bites with lots of fish caught. Slightly windy, overcast conditions fish best. Glassed out and sunny conditions are the toughest to fish.
• Keeghan uses Sunline Siglon 12-14lb main line, which is super thin and long casting. An 8lb fluorocarbon leader is fine for the clear water in the basin, but in the sticks should be upgraded to 12-15lb to handle the structure and the potential saratoga by-catch.

Keeghan’s Best Bass Fishing Lures

• Keeghan loves Jig Spinners (also known as beetle spins), especially in the summer time when the bass are aggressive and reaction bites are the norm. These enable anglers at add a small Colarado blade to a jig head and are rigged with a TT Headlocks 1/6 oz. Keeghan fits these with a Keitech soft plastic tail such as a 2.8″ Swing Impact Fat on a size 2 or size 3 jig spinner. These are used to cover a lot of water and are cast tight to structure or over weedbeds and works fairly briskly.
• The Hot Bite Gangbanger G2 in lickety split and ayu are Keeghan’s second choice. These are very easy to fish, it’s just a matter of counting the spoon down to the right depth and then slowly rolling the lure back through the school.
• Keeghans favourite lure on Borumba is the Ecogear ZX 40 blade, which can be used as a search bait over the flats, fished like a spoon, or dropped vertically and hopped like and ice jig. Keeghan loves to fish this lure by ripping it through the lush green cat tail weed, with bass usually smashing the lure as it breaks free of weed. Colours 471 and 441.