FISHING
With Alex Julius 2 Septmember
Last week I visited one of my favourite Top End lagoons: Four Mile Hole which is part of the Wildman River system in Kakadu.
With me was Jason Wilhelm who lives in Gladstone Queensland. Jason is the gun fishing guide at Awoonga Dam and Monduran Dam. He is also a regular columnist and writer for Barra Bass & Bream magazine, and recently contributed what I believe to be a watershed two-part feature on finding and maximising your chances of catching mega-impoundment barra.
You may have noticed that I have been reporting regularly about how good the fishing has been at 4 Mile since the road opened early in July. Cunning buggers that they are, Roger Sinclair and Glen Hubble got the drop on the rest of Darwin and hit 4 Mile almost as the Road Closed sign was been taken down.
The pair fished mainly with the fly rod and small soft plastics, catching close to 200 barra over two days. However, only the odd fish was over the legal 55cm. The lads caught most of their fish along the main stretch of the lagoon, casting to clear pockets amongst the lilies and grass beds.
The track into 4 Mile is consistently one of the worst in the Top End to tow a boat over and, true to form, the last 30km after the Two Mile Hole junction was sheer hell! Those concrete-hard corrugations cast early-morning shadows that overlapped each other, and boat trailer bits littered the track in.
The Prado Kakadu handled it fine (no surprises there), but I was forever checking the mirrors to make sure the boat was also handling it.
In hindsight, I had nothing to worry about as the trailer – which had been made inhouse by Territory Marine – was built like the proverbial brick outhouse. It had dual axles – unusual for carrying a boat as small as the Ocean Master 451 Riptide we had in tow – but terrific on corrugated roads because one set of tyres is usually touching dirt while the other is suspended.
With a single axle trailer, the tyres simply belt up and down over the corrugations and shake the hell out of the trailer and boat. Add to this the thick checker plate aluminium used on the wheel guards and the overkill dimensions of the box channelling, and you can appreciate just how bullet proof this trailer is.
We arrived at the boat launching area at about 8.00am and we went straight to the area where Roger had caught all those fish in July. We moved up and down the area for about 20 minutes, but nothing was happening.
I’m pretty sure the reason was that the water level had dropped over the previous six weeks and the so-called pockets had shrivelled up with the growth of aquatic vegetation.
Concerned that the best fishing time was slipping away, I suggested to Jason that we might be better off heading for some snags and corners where I normally fished with success. He was more than happy with that.
Using snagless soft plastics, we immediately began pulling barra from amongst dead timber and a couple of lily patches in deepish water. It was fun, but they were all quite small; mostly undersize in fact.
By mid-morning, with the sun quite high, the bites were getting fewer and fewer, and I said to Jason: “Mate, if you’ve got any ideas, make sure you speak up. I think we’re going to be doing it tough now until later this arvo.”
“Well, in the dams, I often find the fish go deeper as the sun gets up, so I look for deeper water near banks with grass beds, especially if the wind is blowing onto the bank because that’s where the warmer water will be,” Jason explained.
“Plus the deeper water is where bigger barra like to be in strong daylight and I reckon that’s for eye comfort,” he said.
So, that’s what we did – we found an area with deep water out from a weedy bank with the breeze blowing onto it.
Jason loves to use 110mm Squidgy Slick Rigs with the heavier Pro jighead, and he almost exclusively uses a threadline outfit, specifically a Shimano Stella 4000 on a T-curve rod.
He began casting right out in the open, letting the softie sink to the bottom and then winding it in at a ridiculously-fast speed, stopping every few seconds to jig the rod and let the lure drop down again before resuming the super-fast retrieve.
Blow me down if he didn’t hook a nice barra on about the third cast. It was on then, and we pulled barra up to 70cm-plus (well, mainly Jason did as I was using a baitcaster and couldn’t get nearly the same distance).
Jason lost one fish which had to be in the high 80s.
So there you go…lesson learnt and filed away for future application.
Guess who’ll be taking a threadline outfit with him on his next barra trip?
Top Queensland barra guide, Jason Wilhelm, works a middle stretch of deep water at beautiful Four Mile Hole.
Jason’s long-casting, high-speed-retrieve tactics using a 110mm Squidgy Slick Rig paid off time and again with quality barra like this 70-plus cm fish.