If a hook-up on a trout is like being connected to a whippet after a rabbit, a Murray cod like hooking a tractor heading for the nearest fence, then hooking up on a sizeable salmon is like being connected to a Formula One car at full throttle.

Never was a fish so maligned as Australian salmon. Well, maybe it’s because they aren’t a salmon at all, having no freshwater breeding phase and instead just sharing a similar physical profile and spots. Or maybe it’s because they don’t taste as good as those pink-fleshed delicacies indigenous to the northern hemisphere.

In New Zealand, they’re known as kahawai. To confuse matters further, in Australia, there are two strains. One comes across from WA and the other comes down the NSW coast to Tassie on the East Australian Current.

Over the years, I’ve become besotted with these fish, and especially, chasing them around the wonderfully pretty town of Tathra on the south coast of NSW.

Tathra is a very fishy place. Some years ago, there was a young man, Scott, running a tiny fishing shop in town. He liked to fish pretty much every day and had settled on living in Tathra, having circumnavigated the continent in search of the ideal place. “If you go much further north,” Scott once told me, “Everything wants to eat or kill you – crocs, man-o-war jellyfish and the like.”

“Tathra though is different,” he continued. “There are none of those. There are just great duskies, yellowfin bream, black bream, whiting, luderick, EPs and mulloway in the warm estuaries. Then there’s the beach fishing and the ocean fishing for the pelagics and the bottom dwellers of every conceivable variety.” No surprise that Scott decided to locate himself in Tathra.

Scott wasn’t entirely right about the nasties in the water, but near enough in comparison to further north. On occasion, there are certainly those blue stingers with tentacles that can snag your around the legs, but in nearly 30 years of going up there, I have only ever seen them dead on the beach, rather than in the water. In the same period, I have only ever seen two sharks – one little hammerhead swimming comically across the surface past the famously picturesque Tathra wharf, and the other last week, a bronze whaler, which appeared seven or eight metres in front of where I was standing in the water a mere five metres from the edge. After I had hurriedly backed up onto the beach, I felt quite privileged to watch this two metre beauty just going about its natural business in its natural environment while I was safely in mine.

I am a beach tragic. And around this part of the coast for good reason. From about Christmas until June, the water is warm and blueish. None of that cold, green Bass Strait water. Well, that’s not quite true, as at times, even during the peak season, a cold upwelling can push onshore, the water temperature dropping from about 22C to about 18C, at which time the beach fishing can shut down for a number of days. Then suddenly switch back on as the current changes again.

I enjoy tossing large silver lures off the beach and having the salmon or tailor absolutely smash them about 50 metres away. But when the salmon thicken up in number, out comes the fly rod.

I was at Tathra last week, bare feet washed by the gentle warm shore break, not the violence of the huge swells 100 metres out. At Tathra, the shore break often merely laps at your feet. Gutters are immediately beyond, and the fish come in very close. For a flyfisher, this means even a half-decent cast lands the fly in useful water.

Near the mouth of the Bega River, with its lunker dusky flathead and abundant bream, there was a characteristic trough right at my feet. A convenient sandbar protruding to its left providing an ideal casting spot. My lures had been smashed half a dozen times by a mix of salmon and tailor, so it was time for the fly.

My flyfishing rig here is nothing special. A 6 weight fly rod, casting a Clouser of sorts which I had tied on a stainless hook: some smallish dumbbells to make sure it sank a bit, a generous wing of white bucktail, a bluish wafting, more subtle sub-tail and a generous amount of Superglue to ensure strength. My reel had been purchased partly because the manufacturer claimed it had stainless steel components. My line was a weight-forward floater, the buoyancy of which I hoped would be useful to mend over the waves now and again when the whole lot threatened to be washed onto the shore by a tidal surge. At the end was two metres of 10kg leader to stop any tailor from cutting the fly off, which itself was attached by a Lefty’s Loop.

Out went the fly into the blue water. Strip, strip, pause. Strip, strip, pause. Then one of those Formula Ones jumped on. I was ready though, and determined not to do a troutie strike and raise my rod tip. I had even practiced doing a strip strike with my left hand half a dozen times. Mind you, I’m not sure it mattered really, because the line was already whizzing though my fingers, me desperately hoping it wouldn’t catch around the buckles of my sandals. Then the line was all clear and the reel hummed. I momentarily thought of slowing the fish by palming the spool, but realised that was a recipe for palm burn, and possibly a knuckle-battering by the whirring handle.

I tightened the drag a bit and was relieved to get a satisfying bend in my rod. Not too much though, as there was a distinct possibility that disrespecting the fish would result in the rod being trashed by a salmon, which simply didn’t give one hoot about either me or my precious Sage.

It was satisfying to eventually swim that fish up the beach with a wave, remove the hook with a mix of wonder and reverence, before carefully releasing it into the wash, where it shot off with apparent indignation.

Out I went to my favourite casting position and repeated the story. The next three times, however, the fish got off in the shore break after showing me my rarely-seen backing. Strikes were missed when fish swooped on the fly towards me. I could certainly tell what  was happening, but even monstrous strip strikes couldn’t take up the slack and set the hook.

No matter. The fish mightn’t have been hooked, but I certainly was.