OOOhhhh yes Dick, thats fishing mate....great story and great photos to give us a visual of the situation....that would have been sensational..lucky bugger
steve
OOOhhhh yes Dick, thats fishing mate....great story and great photos to give us a visual of the situation....that would have been sensational..lucky bugger
steve
Now thats prime wild Barra territory Dick......would love to have a piece of that.....What a Barra......thanks for the report/piccies......Whitto
Good Mates....Good Food.....Good Fishing....Priceless
Yes it was good, but expensive, There's a couple of other places that I have to on occassion employ those sort of obsene tactics, you get that. I'd expect that there'd be a few similar opportunities that would pop up in impoundments with all that timber around where you cant let a fish move more than 10 or so metres.
Braid cuts embedded into the hypalon foregrip is a bit of a give away to bullying fish.
Thanks Dick
Great to hear your stories and reports.
Much appreciated
Ben
Hello Dick, you might like to get a live fibre 50lb impoundment barra rod to do that sort of work. I attach a black sheep 300 sized reel with 50lb jigman and 100lb twisted leader to it when I feel a bit silly and go for a troll through the trees in Faust. Because of the closeness of the trees I only have about 10metres of line out. I have landed fish up to 116cm doing this without them taking any line at all. The fight is short sharp and brutal with the barra just tail walking sideways because they can't take any line. So far the weak link has been the rod holder with 2 of them being smashed out of the boat but it is fun. It's more fun when they hit the rod you are holding but what line they bite is not up to us.
On the topic of barra tactics, I believe that big impoundment barra are much wilier than salties. I know that barra have to deal with crocs and sharks in the wild but in the dams they have to deal with the ultimate hunter, Man, on a daily basis. THe line up at the filleting table at awoonga the other day was 8 boats long, which shows who is at the top of the food chain. Generally a salty only gets to make one mistake in his life and gets eaten by a croc or gets filleted. Impoundment barra hopefully get given many chances to learn from their mistakes because lots of people release them. So they have the natural inborn instincts to escape and the learned responses from being caught consistently, which I believe makes them a much harder animal to fool. In heavily pressured impoundments like awoonga, a truly big barra will have been caught numerous times and would have learnt from that mistake which makes it harder and harder to catch. Even the smaller fish will have been caught a few times so I wouldn't underate the difficulty of catching these fish in impoundments.
Cheers Scott.
Originally Posted by vet
Yes that sounds like a fine way to spend an afternoon every now and then
I'd agree with that to some extent as impondments are angler magnets but you'd have to apply that senario to any place, impoundment or wild rivers where anglers frequent. The greater the fishing pressure the quicker the fish learn. Plenty of river fish go back, especially in areas like the Ord where there's a bag limit of one fish and a slot limit of between 55 and 80cm, therefore the opportunity to learn from experiance is there.On the topic of barra tactics, I believe that big impoundment barra are much wilier than salties. I know that barra have to deal with crocs and sharks in the wild but in the dams they have to deal with the ultimate hunter, Man, on a daily basis. THe line up at the filleting table at awoonga the other day was 8 boats long, which shows who is at the top of the food chain. Generally a salty only gets to make one mistake in his life and gets eaten by a croc or gets filleted. Impoundment barra hopefully get given many chances to learn from their mistakes because lots of people release them. So they have the natural inborn instincts to escape and the learned responses from being caught consistently, which I believe makes them a much harder animal to fool. In heavily pressured impoundments like awoonga, a truly big barra will have been caught numerous times and would have learnt from that mistake which makes it harder and harder to catch. Even the smaller fish will have been caught a few times so I wouldn't underate the difficulty of catching these fish in impoundments.
The further you get away from towns the less educated the fish are to human activities. It's not uncomman to look out of the boat and see free swimming barra in isolated areas, not so common close to town.
Couldn't agree more dick about the fishing pressure speeding up the learning process. I had forgotten about the slot limit in the nw, it had only just came in when I was over there, from what I can remember from fishing the fitzroy we couldn't catch any fish small enough to keep, so we did release a few. So I can see that some fish will be caught and released but I can't say that I ever saw 100 boats in anyone place, that is the normal for around here. Great points as usual Dick, cheers scott.
Monduran barra don't taste too good, and I'm not in a tournament, so, in open water, I go softly softly and casting in the timber I go crank up the drag and hang on.
That said, I sometimes get carried away when trolling solo, and have three rigs in action to cover different depths. It certainly gets the pulse going to have a good fish jumping while motoring ahead and clearing the other two lines
When they get away, my grin gets bigger.
Rick K
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