NT Fishing Report

FISHING
With Alex Julius                22 July

Have you ever thought how great it would be if barra had the same mindset as your typical pelagic species, or some of your bottom dwellers, like cod, for example?

Wouldn’t it be terrific if barra simply charged out and snapped at everything and anything you threw at them; unhesitatingly, and with sheer murder in mind.

Sure, they do it sometimes but not all of the time; in fact, not even most of the time.

Like many serious barra anglers, over the years I’ve tried to work out what makes a barra tick; what ignites that mood that drives it to be somewhere at a particular time, on a particular tide, during a particular season.

Apart from the obvious desire to breed – when spawning barra congregate for a brief period mainly around October – I keep coming back to the same basic conclusion: it’s all about food.

I don’t care where you are, if you’re catching barra, then you can bet that somewhere in the vicinity there will be bait; there will be barra food.

So, if you consider that premise from the opposite angle, it follows that, if there is bait about, then there will be barra.

Not true. The reason is that mullet and other favourite barra tucker spend much of their time trying to be where barra are not. But it’s a good start if there is bait about.

In the tidal estuaries and rivers, overall, the best chance to encounter a feeding barra is at the turn of the tide, especially the low tide because fish are more concentrated with less water. However, it would be a pretty boring old day if you only fished during the turn of the tide.

Or would it be?

Rivers and larger creeks increase in elevation as you move upstream, and the change of tide doesn’t just happen along the whole course of a waterway in one split second.

A typical Top End river could have more than five hours variation in tide times between the mouth and, say, 80 km upriver.

That means you can fish the turn of the tide at more than one spot simply by leap-frogging a changing tide.

For example, the tide may have turned to come in at Spot X 10 km upstream from the river mouth. Just before it turned, you were trolling over some submerged snags and you caught three barra, but the bite stopped when the tide began flowing the other way.

A smart move could well be to belt upriver 10 km or more to another potentially-productive spot, getting there in time to have a fish before the tide arrives.

Clearly, you can do this repeatedly, depending on how far up the river you are prepared to travel or can access and how clear the water is. The trick is being where feeding fish are at different stages of the tide.

There are some tried-and-tested scenarios here.

As a rule, most places fish better during the second half of the falling tide.  This is definitely the case with casting or trolling timber.

Submerged rock-bars usually go the same way, as do hairpin bends.

However, creek mouths often produce best once an incoming tide has been flowing in for an hour or two. The creek mouths I am referring to here are not in run-off mode; there is no colour change. They just provide an opportunity for a barra to ambush bait moving into the creek.

Locating barra-holding structure will help you get ahead of the game.

Starting with submerged timber, the best snags are those with plenty of branches down below where barra can snuggle up to out of the current.

Usually, the best snags are those you can’t see above the water.

You can readily pinpoint fully-submerged snags with your depth sounder but, to know where to start looking, it helps to understand how a snag forms.

Invariably it’s as a result of bankside erosion. As the bank erodes, and tree roots become exposed, a tree could topple into the river or a whole section of bank could slide in, trees and all.

Look for evidence of bankside erosion. Where you find it, check out what’s under the boat.
If you can clearly see where a bank has collapsed, and there are trees sticking out of the water, chances are it has collapsed in the same place before, and there may well be older snags out a bit from the bank and down deeper.

These are prime barra habitat and can be trolled or cast to with deep divers and soft plastics.

As with submerged timber, the presence of a submerged rock-bar is often established by rocks along the river bank, sometimes only seen at low tide.

But some great rock-bars never see daylight, so always keep an eye out for clues on the surface, especially riffled patches of water formed when underwater currents hit steep rocks and cause turbulence. Where you see that, check it out with your depth sounder.

Eddying water is often an indication of structure nearby, usually a spur that cuts into the current. Barra love such backwaters. It allows them to float around, up and down the water column, brushing the edge of the current, and hardly having to wave a pectoral.

The highlight of the trip was local fisho Brian Mappas nailing a big goldie on a Reidy’s knife jig.

Gorden Bull nailed this longtail tuna off Darwin.