NT Fishing Report

With Alex Julius           7 April 2011

It’s a rare event for me to professionally guide nowadays, but that’s exactly what I did for three days just prior to this latest bout of monsoonal deluge.

I did okay, putting my clients onto 50-plus, 35-plus and 45-plus barra consecutively over three days.

Actually, the last day also included five jewfish on lures.

I was lucky because just about all of my clients were experienced and skilled anglers.

However, my brief guiding stint reminded me that professional fishing guiding has to be the toughest tourist gig going.

I mean, if you’re guiding backpackers around the waterfalls and swimming holes of Litchfield National Park, you can’t really miss can you? Those waterfalls and swimming holes will be there waiting for you every single time you do a tour.

If you’re a Kakadu guide and specialise in visiting and interpreting the Aboriginal rock-art sites of our world-heritage-listed national park, once again, you can’t miss. The paintings aren’t going to go away.

However, if you can excuse the pun, it’s a whole different kettle of fish to take people on a guided fishing tour. That’s because the subject of the tour itself (the fish) may not necessarily be playing the game.

This is particularly the case with professional barramundi guided fishing.

For starters, when you head for a waterfall or a rock-art site, you know it awaits you; when you get there, you can see it. That’s not the case with barramundi; you can’t eyeball them because they live under the water.

Sure, there’s sonar technology that can help you locate fish under water.

A fish finder will tell you if there are barra right under the boat, and side or structure scan units can show you fish on either side of the boat.

But what if these electronics don’t detect and show you fish? You’ll have to go look elsewhere.
Of course, even if you find barra, there’s no guarantee that they’ll co-operate.

In fact, barra being barra, it’s likely that they won’t co-operate at all.

I mean, how many times have you located barra but the buggers have refused to bite, or at least bite on what you are offering them?

That’s what the guide has to work out: what lure to use and, often more importantly, how to use it.
But then another variable kicks in: the skill level of the person who is paying the money to be guided.

Let’s look at a typical scenario.

As a guide, you have positioned the boat within casting range of a bunch of snags.

There are gaps about a metre wide and 2m deep between the sticks that are poking out of the water.

You have tied deep-diving, hard-body lures to your clients’ leaders.

You know that there is a good chance of barra being in the snags at the particular time and tide that you have chosen to be there.

All your clients need to do is to cast and land their lures in the one-by-two-metre gaps, wind their reel handles three or four times slowly, stop winding and flick their rod tips down to jerk the lure, pause, flick again and then repeat that style of wind…flick…flick…wind retrieve.

You have not only explained this to them but you have also demonstrated the technique by casting out in the open away from the snags (a good guide would not cast into the snags because he might hook a fish that a client might otherwise have hooked).

Okay, you have three clients aboard.

Usually the most experienced will get a cast away first. We’ll call that person client one.

Client one fires a cast away before the other two are even set. It is a textbook cast well into a gap between snags, and client one then executes the demonstrated retrieval technique.

Whammo, a strapping barra slams the lure and comes tail walking out of the snags.

Yes, the guide thinks…the fish are here. The barra is duly landed, photographed and released.

Client two then makes a cast, hurling his lure 10m past the snag, deep into a mangrove canopy.

Client three also lets go with a spirited cast, exploding the reel into an impossible over-run as the lure jerks back well short of the snags.

Meanwhile client one, having landed his fish, makes another cast that travels just a few centimetres too far and snags up in timber at the back of a gap.

Some 10 minutes later, the chaos is sorted out, although one lure is left dangling in the mangroves and the bird’s nest had to be cut, so two lines need retying with new leaders.

The three clients are again ready to do battle. The guide repositions the boat and all three lures are misfired into the timber, duly snagging up.

By the time this mess is sorted out, and the clients are getting their act together, the fish have gone off the bite.

A good guide doesn’t get flustered by this; it’s just part of the job…the toughest tourism job going.
It’s a job that offers the highest highs (when clients smash the fish, especially big barra), but also the lowest lows (when clients have a bad day, catching bugger all).

AJ guided his old mate and top angler, Australian cricketing legend, Mark Taylor, to a cricket score of quality barra.

Iconic long-time Territorian, Dennis Bree, with one of several barra he caught after heeding the guide’s advice.