A good day fishing
It was early. Still dark when Dan pulled up out the front with the boat ready behind his vehicle. I put my rod in along with some supplies and we headed to the King Ash Bay boat ramp. Dan is used to fishing by himself so I didn’t have to do anything while he launched the boat and parked the car. It’s not the biggest of boats, and I had my doubts as to weather it would get on the plane with a bloke my size in it. But my worries were washed away in the wake of the boat as we sped away from the boat ramp with ease.
The water was still and the sun still rising. Even though this time of year the days get to 39 degrees during the day, this time of morning it is bloody freezing heading down the McArthur River. We did have AC/DC cranking on the boats stereo system to keep us warm.
Dan has a lot of fishing stories to tell and a lot of them seem too good to be true. I had thought that by the end of this trip I would know if the stories could be plausable.
This was the first fishing trip I had been on with no intention of using bait. I didn’t even bring any hooks or tackle for bait fishing. This was a proper hunting trip, using lures only. Dan’s boat is setup for it perfectly, with a large platform at both the front and rear for standing on and flicking lures. We started off with hard bodied lured with some success. A few cod and a couple of small Barramundi.
We travelled way, way up a sneaky creek and found a spot that seemed to tick all the right boxes. It was a snag just outside of a creek, on a runout tide. After a couple of Barra on hard bodies lures, I converted to soft plastic lures. And dan, a keen fly fishermen converted to fly. And this is where the real fun started!
Out of just the one snag, we pulled out no less than 15 Barramundi. They weren’t monsters, with the largest being 60cm. But still it was unbelievable fun! When we left the spot, we took the back of the boat over the snag to see how deep it was. It was 5 feet deep no more than 3 feet away from the bank.
So after catching no less than 25 Barra in the day it was by far the most successful day fishing I’d ever had. We kept 1 and threw the rest back. It was great fun and certainly not just another fishing story.
I have a little video snippet of the magic snag that we were at. It shows a double hookup where as I am landing a fish on my soft plastic lure, Dan gets a strike on his fly and lands a Barramundi as well. It just shows how good the spot was.
We both took our GoPro cameras with us on the trip. Next time we are going to have them both setup and I am really excited to show off some unreal footage of Barra fishing.
Here is the video from this trip …
