Alex's Column 4 December 2025
- NAFA
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
I had an interesting trip to Shady Camp recently.
It was a good week before Cyclone Fina turned up and I’d been scratching my head about where to take two mad-keen anglers who were visiting from Italy of all places.
They were Marco Soldini and his good friend Fero.
I’d met Marco in PNG black bass fishing the year before Covid, and we’d kept in touch.
Marco is one of those larger-than-life characters who owns Italy’s biggest beach club: Papeete Beach.
This is a non-stop party venue with up to six DJs and 1000s of revelers going hard at it at any one time.
It operates only during the Italian summer, and when it gets cold Marco traipses off fishing around the world… it’s not a bad life!
Also with us was my regular angling partner, Roxy Woolley, and we arrived at Shady Camp early morning to meet the top of the tide and have an easy access down the river.
Earlier in the week, I’d been chatting with old mate Jarrod from Reel Screaming Barra Fishing Charters.
Jarrod was at the ramp with clients at the same time as us, and he had been perplexed by the sheer numbers of barra – including lots of big ones – he’d been sounding down the river, none of which showed any inclination to bite; except for the very small ones.
At the ramp, two anglers were pulling out after a couple of long nights pounding the water, and they told a similar story: using forward-facing sonar, they’d never seen so many big fish down the Mary, and struggled to get a bite, even at night.
From my perspective, that was good news and bad news: good that there were so many big barra about and bad that they were not biting.
There wasn’t much water coming over the Shady Camp barrage, but the tide favoured us and I blasted straight down to the mouth.
Marco and Fero had just fished Queensland’s Lake Prosperpine with a top guide I had recommended – Dylan Bryre-Mills – and had used forward-facing sonar for the first time, catching some nice impoundment barra up to 110cm, so that box had been ticked.
Once down at the mouth, where surprisingly there was only one other boat, we sounded up barra almost immediately.
In fact, there were big fish showing up on the Lowrance Active Target 2 all over the place.
At the usual haunts, it was nothing to see more than 20 clearly-big fish swimming around at any one time, and I’m talking 90s and metreys.
You could see their tails kicking but for the most part they ignored our lures; we only managed to turn a couple in several hours of fishing and lure changing.
Amongst the big ones, there were also very active smaller barra, seemingly darting around and quite excited, but they too failed to bite.
Given that the top local guide at Shady Camp and a pair of clued-up anglers had already experienced what we were experiencing firsthand, it was clear that something was going on.
In my opinion – and I said so at the time – these barra were spawning… and it wasn’t food that was on their minds.
October/November are the peak barra spawning months, and spawning takes place at the river mouths.
Well we were fishing a river mouth in November, and there were big female barra everywhere, and lots of smaller, mature male barra swimming around with them.
Everything pointed to piscatorial copulation (remember, you heard that here first).
Eventually, we gave up and headed back upstream on the making tide to see what Jarrod was up to.
He was trolling just a couple of kilometres down from the barrage and was catching barely-legal barra on green 15A Bomber lures.
We followed suit and managed to put a few fish onboard, but nothing of any size.
Notwithstanding, it had been a very interesting day, and I’m fairly certain that we had witnessed a seasonal spawning congregation at the mouth of the Mary River.
On the positive side, there were a lot of big fish down there, and they will get hungry and bite lures soon enough.
