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GettinG to Arnhemland Barramundi Nature Lodge near Maningrida is pretty painless these days. I hitched a ride to work with my Missus, Mary, in the morning, jumped a train to Brisbane Airport, flew to Darwin where I was joined by Alex ‘AJ’ Julius, and Shaana McNaught from Tourism NT, then we all flew on to Maningrida, arriving at the Lodge with barely enough time to dump our gear before the guides

returned from their day’s fishing. Soon I was yarning with a sunburned bunch of anglers scattered around the deck, cold beers in hand, recapping another successful day while the setting sun turned on a spectacular late afternoon light show over the Liverpool River flood plain below us.

They were pretty typical of the people you meet at fishing destinations everywhere: business people, self-employed tradies, pro-

Fishing rich NT waters is one thing, doing so with expert advice and top hospitality—that’s paradise!

Paradise

Words & Photos Warren steptoe

Shaana McNaught from Tourism NT got to fish with Steptoe and AJ

(poor girl) and managed the top threadie of the trip.

Barra legend Col Cordingley (right) with his mate Dave Kestel who caught this little black jewie.

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Arnhem lore• having an extra rod rigged with a

different lure immediately available is a worthwhile exercise in any kind of fishing—especially in barra fishing.

• today’s telegraphic GsP lines and responsive graphite rods have introduced new levels of bite detection—but only if you work at interpreting what the rod and line are telling you.

• Lure colour is usually less important than presentation, but on occasions when one colour works better than others, play it for all it’s worth!

• sometimes subtle differences (and sometimes anything but subtle differences) in lure presentation can be a critically important ingredient to success—watch what your companions are doing and be prepared to change if they’re catching more fish.

• Listen to what fishing guides are telling you. After all, their knowledge and experience is what you’re paying for.

• Bigotry about fishing techniques is up to you, but if you want to catch more fish, leave it at home and be prepared to use whatever technique is more likely to be productive.

• When chasing barra, seeing lots of crocodiles can be an indication there will be barra nearby. Ask yourself what the saurians are hanging about for.

PRO TIPS

Guide Lance Butler shows a barra from well up the Cadell River, where the fish aren’t pure salties.

Trevor Ledgard won his trip to Arnhemland Barramundi Nature Lodge in a competition, it looks as if he enjoyed himself, doesn’t it?

Big black jewies on lures are a regular feature of

Arnhem Land fishing.

fessionals… plus a couple of wandering fly fishermen from the American Midwest who got to talking about bears. Think what you like about crocodiles, these blokes’ bear sto-ries convinced me I can live with crocs easily enough—if that’s the worst thing you have to live with to fish for barra in the numbers available in Arnhem Land.

Our bear-fearing Americans and their mates were at the end of their trip, and I guess letting your hair down at the end of a good fishing trip is all part of it. Apparently the Lodge’s traditional mud crab banquet finished this bunch’s trip off in style, too, because none of them appeared for breakfast before we went fishing the next morning.

In between parties, the guides had a rest day—except for young Mick, who was going fishing with us.

I’m unsure if Mick was trying to steal AJ’s ‘secret’ spots, or if AJ was borrowing his—I just cast where I was told to cast, and fed out my lure to troll when told to do so. I’ve done enough barra fishing to not really need a guide, but there is no substitute for local knowledge, and when it comes to guides, here I was with two of the best.

And of course, Shaana. I have to confess some prior doubts about the lady from Tourism NT. When Alex told me she was coming I thought, bloody hell AJ, what have you saddled us with? But I should have had more faith, and cheered up considerably that morning when Shaana turned up in a long sleeved fishing shirt, pair of rubber thongs and her own rod—a baitcaster no less. It very quickly became evident the lady could fish. And also proved pleasant company, indeed.

Every time I’ve been to Arnhemland Barramundi Nature Lodge the fishing’s been great and this time was no different. The next few days blur together and to recount it in full detail would soon become tiring, so I’ll extract a selection of snippets that illustrate what Arnhem Land fishing’s all about. And seeing as the title Arnhemland Barramundi Nature Lodge is such a clumsy mouthful, I’ll stick with referring to it as ‘the Lodge’.

As Alex and I had planned, we focused quite a lot of effort on some famous rockbars in the Blythe and Liverpool River estuaries, plus filled in time between by casting snags, working over junctions, and trolling sections of riverbank where past wet seasons have deposited ‘runs’ of fallen timber.

We caught fish from all of them. One

thing about barra fishing though is that it’s rarely constant. Saltwater barra work the tides, and the times they’re actively feeding in different situations can be quite defined.

Good guides assemble a repertoire of ‘situations’ they fish in sequence appropriate to prevailing tides. In barra fishing, there must be times when your guide is more or less marking time before moving on to their next planned spot. The guides at the Lodge don’t last long if they don’t measure up to AJ’s pretty demanding standards.

To maintain the pace, which can be physically demanding across several succes-sive days if unaccustomed to the tropics, it’s worth going hard when your guide’s body language says it’s time to, and sitting back a bit when he’s marking time. On this trip I don’t recall sitting back at all!

The Lodge is not the place to bring any of that ridiculous bigotry about casting and trolling. Once they figure out the level of intensity their clients like to fish at, these guides cast when it’s the more appropriate or more likely technique to produce, and troll when trolling’s the way to go.

On this trip, for example, I found myself going through my entire repertoire of barra techniques. We spent a lot of time casting hard-bodied lures, which is my favourite way to catch barra, but we also fished soft plastics, and trolled almost half the time

I found it best to have two rigged rods ready to go each morning: a G.Loomis BCR663 Mossyback, used for casting, and a stiffer CR665 GL3, mainly for trolling.

Each outfit was matched with a top of the range Daiwa reel. This allowed me to make an instant choice between two different lure types, and between an outfit with some give in it—the BCR663 rig—and the CR665, which is more persuasive.

Given my experience, it worked very well, but it was interesting to see that after Shaana pulled the hooks out of a couple of fish (through no apparent fault of her own), Alex changed her over to one of the Lodge’s rods with a softer action than the one she’d brought. It really illustrated how much difference seemingly subtle changes in rod action can make when she had far less problem staying connected afterwards.

Alex’s and my experience showed too, when trolling. However, Shaana soon worked out how to use the ‘telepathy’ of GSP line and the sensitivity of a graphite rod to ‘walk’ her lure across a mess of structure. After that, she matched us fish for fish.

My point being that even when fishing with a guide, you will definitely catch more fish if you listen to what they’re trying to tell you, stay alert to what your companions are doing (if they’re catching more fish than you), and be prepared to change tack.

The lure colour thing reared its ugly head when a Blue Dazzler Classic 120 I was using racked up several fish in quick succession. Lure colour is way down the list of impor-tant things after your actual presentation of a lure—at least until indications are that on the day, a particular colour is being particu-larly productive.

This is what you travel to Arnhem Land for, some of the best barra fishing on the planet.

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Shaana with a typical Arnhem Land saltie barra.

Then it’s time to use that colour for as long as it remains the colour. Otherwise, focusing on presentation will always catch more fish in the end.

On this trip we were on a succession of blue lure days and after being shown a little humility by a couple of Blythe rockbar mon-sters, I was reduced to a single surviving Blue Dazzler Classic 120 that somehow managed to last until the end of the trip. By which time its colour was barely recognisable.

Super-sized dam barra have somewhat corrupted my perception of what constitutes a good barra these days and yet the average size of these Arnhem Land fish impressed me. We caught heaps of fish in the 70s and 80s (centimetre zones, that is) and when they’re ‘saltie barra’—chrome plated with that wonderful pink sheen and those yel-low fins—it’s as good as barra fishing gets anywhere! I’ve decided I’ll have something pointed to say to the next person I hear expressing disappointment a barra was “only an 80-something.”

The best laugh we had among many dur-ing the few days of some of the best fishing I’ve ever enjoyed, was a neat little 70cm barra that showed AJ what for. This fish ran and jumped and generally played up until I got the camera out for some beside-the-boat jump shots. It waited politely, and then when Alex stuck his rod up in the air to make it jump (watch any barra fishing DVD and see this done), promptly climbed out of the water and spat the lure with an audible “Ptooey!”. We all ducked!

We saw two black jewies over a metre long caught on lures, both from the Blythe rockbar. I was lucky enough to score one—a 115cm fish—which Shaana kindly posed for me, and another lodge guest scored the other, an even bigger 120cm beauty. Big jewies on lures have become quite a regular bonus at the Lodge.

Now, a reminder to prospective barra-mundi fishers everywhere: how you work

your lure can make a big difference. On one day in particular, the most productive presentation used a suspending lure fished with a very hard short jerk followed by a long pause. This is the retrieve you hear so much about when fishing the evergreen gold Bomber, which actually wasn’t the lure in use here for a change. On the days it works, it’s magic!

When trolling the rockbars we used a similar technique. We trolled along until our lures came into contact with the bot-tom structure, then dropped our rods back to allow the lures to float up above the obstruction. Then after a few seconds ‘float’ time, a really sharp jerk or two followed by another usually resulted in rod tips slam-ming down from a solid strike.

Just sitting there holding the rod, we would have been acting as rod holders, and would only score an occasional fish.

The most frustrating experience of my time in Arnhem Land came when guide Lance Butler located a heap of barra sus-pended along a bank near a junction. We pulled a couple out and things were looking good when the bite shutdown tight. As tight as the proverbial fish’s bum. We could see dozens of barra stacked up like firewood on the sounder, but they would not bite!

Lance hung around for half an hour, wait-ing for something to change, but it didn’t and in the end we had to move on, with Lance mumbling that they were “not bitin’ at the moment”.

Earlier that same day as we cruised upriver, we encountered a huge collection of crocs laying about in the sun. They were busy warming themselves and not keen to slide back into the water at all. So what about the old wives’ tale about the barra being where the crocs are?

You guessed it, a rockbar near there provided one of the hottest barra bites encountered all trip. See what I mean about preferring crocs over bears?

The tale goes that the crocs

are where the barra are, and

this trip showed it’s true—

sometimes at least.