NT Fishing Report
With Alex Julius 16 June 2011
By now, most anglers who chase barra would be aware of the latest technique for trolling up big barra on our tidal rivers, particularly the Daly River.
Basically, the technique is to troll much faster than normal – say, 4-6kph – with big shallow-to-medium-diving lures, not necessarily near the bank but out in the middle too, and mainly on the bigger tides.
It really never ceases to amaze me when a new technique evolves that should have been developed decades before.
If you go back to the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the ONLY way you fished the Daly – ie once it cleared and any run-off fishing was over – was to troll 15cm (6 inch) Nilsies, properly called Nilsmaster Invincible.
When you think about it, this lure only gets down to about 3m trolling against the current, which also was the ONLY way to troll the Daly.
Fishing with the big imported Nilsie was such a phenomenon on our big tidal rivers that other, Australian lure manufacturers, tried to emulate it.
Of those, only one really managed to make the grade – to crack the code, so to speak – the Killalure Barrabait. But again, this was only a medium-diver, although it swims marginally deeper than the big Nilsie. So come the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, we were all trolling Killalure Barrabaits on the Daly.
Suddenly that all changed when some astute, forward-thinking anglers began going deep on the Daly.
Warren de With – long-time and still current AFANT President – and Neil Croft were the first to use deep-diving lures on the Daly, mainly Mann’s 20+ deep-divers.
“We like fishing the holes with deep snags,” I remember Warren telling me.
By the mid-‘90s, this technique had earned the pair victory in the Barra Classic, and suddenly deep-diving lures were in vogue and Australian lure manufacturers were actively developing new models.
The Killalure Barrabait became available in both 12+ and 20+ deep-divers, RMG Scorpions arrived and dived to 5m plus, Reidy’s Goulburn Jack and Halco Poltergeists got right down, and the Classic 120 in 10+ and 15+ claimed a huge share of the barra lure market (which it continues to do today).
Everyone stopped fishing with Nilsies and the Killalure Barrabait 8+, and all trolling on the Daly was happening 2-4 metres deeper.
It should also be understood that those early years of the Nilsie and Barrabait were pre-fish finders. None of us used fish finders (depth sounders) for barra fishing, so we didn’t know what was below us…we just merrily trolled our medium divers over proven areas and caught fish. Fish finders opened up a whole new world and played a major role in the move to deep-diving lures for barra trolling.
With fish finders, we worked the submerged deep snags effectively, and we found deep rock-bars and banged our lures across them.
Successful as trolling deeper divers has been, and still is, it also begs the question: what sort of trolling were we doing in the old days when our lures were working around 2.5-3m?
Sure we’d hit snags, but a lot of the time we were clearly swimming well over the top of them…and we didn’t know what was down there anyway, so it didn’t matter…but we WERE catching fish.
Getting back to the latest craze for trolling big, shallower-running lures above the snags and rock-bars, and even out in the middle of the river, it must be said that the Daly River is chockers with barra of all sizes nowadays, and that can only be because it was closed to commercial fishing way back in 1988.
At this point, let me tell you a story about an amazing catch that took place back in the late ‘70s (or perhaps very early ‘80s).
Apparently a bloke in a little tinny was fishing on his own down the Daly. The story goes that he was drunk and happily trolling much too fast down the middle of the river with a 12cm Nilsmaster Invincible (which swims even shallower than the bigger 15cm version). Suddenly he hooked a monster barra which somehow he landed.
From memory, it weighed 56lb and I believe a fibreglass cast of the fish still hangs on the wall at the Trailer Boat Club. At the time, we all had a good laugh at this preposterous catch.
“The bloke was drunk, trolling fast too…ha, ha, ha…down the middle of the river…ha, ha, ha…when he stumbled across a huge fish…ha, ha, ha!”
Guess what, the penny should have dropped then because, three decades later, this is the hot new technique.
Just in the last few weeks, big lures like the 16A Bomber, Reidy’s Big Ass B52, Halco Laser Pro 195 and Tackle World’s big Strada have accounted for dozens of metre-plus barra on the Daly.
Obviously, this period has also included the Barra Classic and the Barra Nationals, where both the biggest barra caught were on big lures (specifically the Big Ass B52) trolled faster than normal and out in the open.
These bigger fish – and plenty of smaller ones too – are travellers.
They’re not holding on snags but are floating up and down the river, most definitely accompanying the food source (mullet and baby barras), and are ready, willing and able to chase after and smack a big lure that is swum past them at pace as if it is trying to get away.
When you think about it, this new technique has definite merit over trolling deep and battling hook-grabbing snags.
Danny Jansen’s 109cm barra – the biggest caught at the recent Barra Nationals – took a trolled Reidy’s Big Ass B52.
Liam Allsop’s metre barra came from the Daly River.