More Of the Small From Darwin Shores.

It occurred to me this afternoon that some of the most rewarding fishing experiences are not the times when one bags out on big fish - although we certainly all hope for that - but when, instead, the fishing is hard going; the fish seem to have either shut down, or else there are just not many specimens about.  On these occasions an angler must have recourse to every ounce of fishing ingenuity to tempt something to gobble a lure... not to forget a healthy dose of stubbornness.  Finally, after trying every conceivable technique, lure and colour for an hour or three, gritting teeth and refusing to let the sea win, the effort pays off with a fish or two.  Such ordeals, with the hard-earned reward at the end, are what fishing is all about for me. It is where one really learns how to catch fish - listening to the particularity of ones location and really working with ones angling skill-set - such that one can, eventually, catch at least one fish every time one goes fishing.
Suddenly that little rock cod that is an annoyance on a day when barra are rolling around in the shallows and snapping at plastic paddle tails becomes a piece of gold whose measure is sweat and effort in an angling desert.  What makes a good angler is not, as the common belief runs, patience.  Rather, it is a lack of patience, a stubborn desire to not leave without a fish, sensitivity to the fishing location and frantic experimentation. Well... we must tell ourselves such things: there is always a smidgeon of luck involved.
So here are some photos from just such a session.
First up was a little fingermark, just after a fellow angler - who had done quite well the day before - gave up.  The sun was beating down and the fish just were not playing ball.  But I wasn't letting this work-free day slip away so readily without a damn fish, so I kept plugging away, changing lure every few casts.  The fingermark slipped from my hands as I poised the iPhone for a snap... I am still getting the hang of just hanging onto wet fish whilst standing in water and twisting a camera phone in my other hand.  So here is a flick of the first of a few cod on a Megabass X-layer.

Then this little fella jumped on the X-layer, a lure almost the same length as the creature's ambitious body. I'll have to do a bit of research into what the hell it is.  It had poisonous looking spikes under its jaw, and a mouth of boney plates that could crush shell: I was silly enough to let it clamp down on my finger for a second.  An anime escapee perhaps? A finned and scaled peg fallen to water from a washing line?

"Take me to your leader..."; bad pun.

Then a surprise catfish on my favourite flats barra coloured medium sized minnow.  Gold and red-ish.

Smith make beautiful lures for beautiful fish.  What lovely eyes you have!

These catfish sure know how to take drag.  I was hoping it was going to flash a bit of silver, then leap and show itself as a decent barra.  But beggars can't be choosy.

And finally a bungy-jumper on a Megabass Flap Slap, which I hoped would imitate the herring harbour fish like to suck down at this time of the year.  Instead it inspired a cod to some extreme sport.

So after sensibleness would have long called the day fish-less and settled for a beer, I managed 3 cod, that odd little plate-mouthed critter, a fingermark and a catfish.  Nothing big, but persistence paid off.

Later that evening I hit 'Pond X', but didn't have to work so hard: 3 barra in an hour, plus a hatchback version of a giant herring and a tarpon.

My first barra on a Megabass Griffon. Shallow diving with a tight and frenzied wobbling action.

Only the finest quality iPhone photography! 

Secret Megabass Barra attractor with inlaid mother of pearl... and a much tougher lure than the Vision 110. 

The tarpon had quite a few snaps at this gold Smith Camion, but only one could commit.

Folks up North seem to call these herring Ladyfish. I guess fisherman get lonely too.

 I know there are more of these giant herring around (another "Secret Spot X"...) and they are great fun on light tackle.  This night they were mostly splashing about just out of casting range.  I was lucky to get this on a big stickbait.  For my 'tackle enthusiast problem', this is enough of an excuse to look into buying a rod just for the purpose: fishing light lures and unweighted plastics in an area where I need to cast them the better part of 40 meters while surrounded by scrub.  So I've ordered this... Evergreen Kaleido Designo... a rod utterly unsuited to most Northern Australian fishing. Unless you also like chasing sooty grunter and barra in small streams!

I think someone else must have been consumed by the rubbish I have to wade through when 'Pond X' is flooded at high tide, with only a single shoe escaping the maw of rubbish and mud.  A jogger hopefully.

Against the Rising Wind... and Puddle X

After the evasive drawl of returning to work for my first full week since arriving back in Australia, today I found myself finally free for a fish.  Upon waking, the day was calm- though as muggy as the wet season has each day be - and in a few hours lay a low tide.  Fishing the shoreline of Darwin revolves around either a low tide exposing for the angler's feet stretches of rock or sand that are usually drowned beneath a few meters of sea; or else a high tide whose flood pushes fish into places they are eager to feed.  At present there is a 7 meter difference between high and low. That means 2 sessions on a work-free day!

By the time I was ready to head to 'point x' - perhaps the safest bet for a barra capture near Darwin's CBD - the palm leaves were swaying in a direction I preferred not to see: 'point x' would have a milliard little brown waves slapping across its shallows, which barra do not like.  So instead I drove to East Point, which has a few options somewhat away from a North West wind.

This was my second session from Darwin shores in almost 4 months.  I chose a location where a channel of turquoise water lay protected from the wind by an expansive bed of rocks shallowly covered.  Third cast and my Fish Arrow Flash-J shad was getting niggly knocks.  Next cast, this pretty little cod sucked the Flash-J down...

After a few more small hits - likely from another cod - I changed location.  Putting on a tiny DUO popper, what looked oddly like a fat pikey bream leapt sideways from the water, flinging the popper a few feet without getting hooked.  Several casts later, another hit without a taker.  The wind was growing too fierce for the popper, so I switched to a 4 inch Sawamura One Up Shad. These are perhaps my favourite paddle-tailed soft plastics: the indented mid-section gives the lure a great wobble, and the tail action is vivid enough to be felt as a pur through the rod tip.  There is a groove both above and below for fishing them weedless - I like to use weedless jigheads such as the Decoy Nailbomb, which fit these plastics perfectly.
Second cast with the One Up Shad and I received a solid hit as soon as it collided with the surface... but no hook set.  This is what was returned to me...

One Up Shads are a rather soft bait, but whatever did this had teeth more poignant than a long tom.
As the tide drove me back, the wind picked up even more, which now made feeling adequate contact with a soft plastic difficult.  Using a heavier jighead in this rocky area only leads to snags.  So hardbodies were the option.

This parrot fish fought like a bigger barra... for 5 seconds.  An ambitious fish considering the size of the Smith lure it hit.

Half an hour of casting bigger hardbodies proved otherwise fruitless. So on went a Zipbaits Khamsin to see if any smaller fish were about.  One was, but not the little fingermark or 7 inch barra I expected...

The young mackerel fought valiantly considering it was quite outgunned.  Exciting to catch a mackerel on a stalwart black bream lure.

The weather kept turning worse, and with thunder and shifts of rain in the distance, I decided to have a break until high tide at 'puddle x'.

One fish that is less than a regular on the end of a Darwin angler's line - unexpectedly for those moving to Darwin from Southern states - is the mighty mangrove jack.  I managed to catch only two throughout  2012, both being surprise fish when targeting other species (my few dedicated mangrove jack explorations always came back empty).  One location I thought had mangrove jack potential was confirmed by Hiro, who vouches he has pulled a few out.  'Puddle x' can only viably be fished during tides over 7.2 meters.  I've caught barra and tarpon there on a handful of visits.  But tonight, despite arriving half an hour after high tide, the Sawamura One Up Shad gathered me something red...

Not a big fish - and I apologise for the awful, night-time iPhone shots - but this is the first Darwin mangrove jack I have caught when actually targeting them specifically.  I also had 2 other jack bumps - both managed to mostly drag the lure off the jighead - and a quick barra hookup that just as quickly slipped the hook.  Hopefully I can pull out a larger jack next session...

Shady Camp when it just won't rain...

The first time I drove to the Shady Camp barrage, I was rather unimpressed.  Not being familiar with the NT's floodplains, it struck me as barren.  Over the past year and a half it has proved itself a most fertile place. And with every visit the natural cast changes.  Of course the agile wallabies are always there, and the boobook owls that roost in the left hand camping ground's trees.  But what I really mean are those nights when, in a drizzly, light rain, green tree frogs emerge in force, clinging on every rock and low tree limb.  Or when the giant stink flowers of a certain kind of yam were found beneath one of the shady old figs, bestowing in a 50 meter radius the odour of maggoty carrion.

Usually at this time of year the place is thick with mosquitoes: I've travelled to 25 countries, and nothing comes close to the mosquito population of Shady after rain.  Few mosquitoes were there last weekend; though still enough to leave rounds of bites on whatever parts of my frame happened to press against our tent's mesh as I slept. Instead, last weekend, tiny insects were in plague proportions: minuscule moths of several varieties, miniature cockroaches, beetles of many kinds. In ears, mouths, crowding to any unfortunate light.
And this fella too:

But everyone really heads to Shady Camp for the fish, fish that last weekend were unforthcoming.
The lack of a wet so far has meant the fish are yet to fire.  Driving there, dreaming of all the freshly spawned fish awaiting high tide so they could slip upstream across the barrage, imagining catching those fish on the saltwater side - now released from the several month no-fishing season - I recalled the 19 fish my partner and I caught around this time last: all fish over-size, captured in under three hours by yo-yoing 4inch stickbaits in the current on bream tackle!

Arriving at the barrage, I could see that things weren't right: no-one fishing except two blokes drinking by their ute.  After a chat with them - friendly old Darwin locals who recounted the 8 hour drive to Shady when they were kids - I gathered no-one had done any good despite there being 10 people fishing the high tide two hours ago.
Still, fisherman not catching fish in the NT doesn't generally mean there are no fish there... one just has to have an inkling how to catch them.  Well, at least that is sometimes the case.
So off I tramped with a 1000 Stella and my 2lb - 6lb Millerrod Ultra Finesse Breambuster, loaded with 4lb Untika trout braid and a cast of 2 - 2.5 inch stickbaits on weedless Decoy jig heads.  First cast, nothing.
Second cast and i felt that familiar, lip of the barrage, rattling hit as a fish darted out to grab what it thought was a little mullet about to be sucked over by the current...

OSP Mylar Minnow

 Third cast and so forth...

OSP Mylar Minnow

A particularly bronze 'rat' on a Megabass Tiny XLayer

And all the other photos were worse than this fish, caught on a Fish Arrow flash J

 An hour later, as the sun was setting and the mosquitoes began sticking my skin, I had landed 8 barra up to 40cm.  Most people call barra this size 'rats'.  There is an odd phenomenon in the barra fishing world where fisherman act as though catching small fish is a curse.  I'm one of those bream and trout luring, southern weirdos who is just happy to catch any fish, and catch as many as possible.  Each fish is a unit of happiness for me.  As a teenage, competition match angler, I once even won a coarse angling comp by catching five galaxias smaller than my little finger, using single maggots on size 22 hooks.

The problem with this attitude towards smaller barra is that, having fished at least 3 times a week in the NT for the past year, not only do I even see anglers regularly catching any fish, let alone 'rats'; but all the bigger barra I have seen caught in the past year have really had more to do with chance than angler skill.  Take a busy day at the Shady barrage for example, where you have 10 fisherman, half with wire traces, casting generally similar paddle-tailed soft plastics.  Unless the fishing is particularly miserable, someone is certain to hook something and that someone will hook that something not due to a skill the 9 other anglers lack, but due to the lucklessness of an unfortunate fish that will soon be flopping amongst beers in an esky.  This equates to simple statistical probability, not a skilful bending of fate to the angler's wily will.

A Darwin beach 'rat' on a Bassday Sugar Minnow, 3lb fluoro, a 2lb-4lb Daiko Elize JDM trout rod and 1000 Stella.

Of course there are some barra anglers who regularly catch meter plus fish.  Those I know who accomplish this impressive feat have boats and go to remote, big rivers.  But as to being land based, I recall days spent fishing the run-off at the three bridges in Kakadu where i would average between 30 to 50 fish of all sizes a day whilst seeing perhaps ten - if lucky - fish caught the entire day by all other anglers combined, most of whom stick to the trusty white, pre-rigged squidgy fish.  They would dismissively scoff at the 'rats' I was catching, then fall silent when I battled out a 70 or 80 cm fish on what was racks-weight bream gear.  As the proverb goes, you can catch a big fish on a small hook, but not a small fish on a big hook.  Though I guess the logic of using heavier tackle is that you may not catch nearly as many fish as a light tackle angler, but if you hook that big one you've a much better chance of landing her.  Never mind all the practice one gets playing fish on light tackle!  When things are all said and done, I think the dismissal of and purported disappointment with catching 'rats' is all empty posturing, and folks are really inwardly pleased, like me, just catching any fish.

Back to Shady Camp on the weekend.  After being mildy titillated by the 8 'rats' i hooked in an hour, I set my alarm to wake for the 2AM high tide.  As usual I expected a few of those dirty bait fishermen to be illegally chucking their mullet off the barrage in the post-midnight hours - Fisheries really need to do something about this.  But when my alarm rang, I awoke to rain, put on snooze and awoke at 9am, only 7 hours late for the night's high tide.  Sure enough in the morning I found traces of the dirty baitos' illegal fishing: a big catfish half dead in the shallows that had partially dried in the sun and somehow made its way back to the water to slowly die; the usual rubbish and beers left across the barrage with hooks and tangled line; and the poor little 'rat' below that had been oddly released after probably being gut hooked.  Perhaps the baitos thought it too small for eating...

By 10am I was fishing and things weren't looking good: already boats were returning.  I spoke to some blokes who had been in the salt all night, resulting in just two fish.  A few hours later, with only a few follows to show, I was packing up when a couple parked their car, wobbled onto the barrage and proceeded to fish.  A few casts later one of them hooked a 75cm fish at her feet, casting a big pre-rigged Bozo on a wire trace.  It was the first time she had ever used a lure.  I felt broken, watching them kill the fish, then watching her cast at every big mullet yelling Barra, Barra. By this time things were getting crowded, so I left a few hours before high tide.

Off to nearby Stream X for a bit of fun in the fast water:

Smith Camion

Ito Craft Emishi

Duo tiny popper

My biggest spotted grunter so far, taken in slower water on a Next One Drug Shad

After 10 tarpon, a missed barra of around 50cm and noticing the small crocodiles growing bigger as I headed upstream, then having a bolt of lightning land a few hundred meters away, we were off to the Corroboree Park Tavern for a well earned meal, then back to Darwin for work early the next day, with lightning following us the entire way.