Easter is always a great time of year to go fishing.
Notwithstanding the requirements to fish on your own, or with members of your own household, the tides this Easter break offer some interesting opportunities.
For starters, they are massive: tomorrow’s Darwin Harbour high tide at 7.51am is a whopping 8m, and it gets there following 7.5m of run-in tide.
Interestingly, the afternoon low tide at 1.50pm is not as low as you might expect at 1.5m.
However, dropping from 8m in six hours, there’ll still be plenty of movement.
For my money, these tides scream Darwin Harbour barramundi.
I’d look at launching around 9.30am, and heading into any of the harbour arms.
Winds will be around 10-20kph until early afternoon, and then should drop right away.
That means you can find a lee-shore mud flat and fish it on the falling tide, and then as the tide charges back in there’ll be the prospect of schooling mullet getting hammered by hungry feeding barra.
Fish around gutters and inside channels that might contain baitfish and make it easier for barra to nail them.
This scenario is much the same for Easter Saturday, but by Sunday and definitely Monday, there’s a lot less movement between high and low tides.
Those days are when you might consider heading offshore, chasing pelagics, including billfish, or tracking down some golden snapper or black jew.
The latter is still biting like crazy on the usual spots.
Mind you, I also fancy Leaders Creek for an early-morning troll at the mouth on the big tides over Easter.
It’s worth noting the advice to fishos on the https://coronavirus.nt.gov.au/community-advice/sports-and-recreation page:
At this stage, if you are traveling to sites that don’t require passing through a remote community (like Shady Camp or Corroboree Billabong) you should be able to do so.
This includes fishing in:
Darwin Harbour Dundee Leaders Creek Bynoe Harbour Channel Point Adelaide River (mouth) Cox Peninsula Shoal Bay
Only people from the same household can go fishing together, whether that is immediate family members or housemates, as long as:
· you provide proof you all live at the same address
· you are not sick
· you are not in self-quarantine
If you go fishing, maintain good hygiene practices, fish locally if you can and DO NOT overcrowd any areas, including boat ramp car parks.
If the boat ramp is busy, either stay in your car until physical distancing can be practised or move to another location/boat ramp.
I dare say, there’ll be a small army of single boaters and one-household fishos heading for Shady Camp over Easter.
Those big morning high tides are perfect for the coastal creeks west and east of the Mary River mouth.
PHOTOS:
Craig (Lats) Latimore with one of a brace of 102cm barra he caught solo on his favourite Reidy’s Big B52 in Tropic Thunder colour.
Crystal Neal fished her favourite land-based spot for this quality barra, one of several she caught with sister Jackie.
Taken just before social distancing came into play, pictured are Eli Neal and Lane Nash with their nice barra catch.