Had a lot of fun camping recently, see my website for the stories. But it’s meant that my poor boat hasn’t gotten a decent run in a while. I’m getting more busy, not less, until mid September. So with a public holiday on the Friday, off we went.

Hit Stokes point first thing, a few splashes and good boof had me in an optimistic mood. For those who don’t know, Darwin has huge tides. Combined with heavy dry season wind, water visibility is usually poor. Today was totally different, I could see the ground from about 2.5m, it was amazing. It meant I was able to sight cast, but nope, no luck there.

Moved across to the weeds near Swires Bluff. Water visibility meant we saw about 20 rays, and about 10 turtles, a few said hello. Saw lots of fish too, trevelly, queenies, sharks, a bright blue beast sitting on the bottom I was unable to identify. (It didn’t look like a tuskfish to me). Twitched some hardbodies by them all. And some squidgies. Also: gulp, poppers, vibes… you get the idea. Bait fish and life everywhere, none of it interested. Here we caught our sole fish for the day, a long tom.

Once the tide started to recede we the rocks at talc head, and soon saw schools of fish swimming out of the creek. None of them wanted to bite. In fairness, they may have been milkfish, I was struggling to identify them. Up and down, plus a quick trip to some flats on the way home… pretty disappointing day. You could not have picked a better day for it. If I had of known the wind would have been so far down, I would have taken some bait and sat somewhere.

Two boats at the ramp also came up empty.

Ah well, good way to spend a day.

Got:
Joe: Long tom

Story of the trip:
Water visibility. Never seen the harbour like that before.

Boat problems:
Haven’t launched it in a while and when we went to push it off it was firmly stuck. Just would not budge. Then we tried this new method that I’d heard about, which involves unhooking the boat before trying to launch. Slid off no worries!

Snap
In two metres of water here, check out the bottom

Been doing a bit of camping and other busy work, combined with a small boat, bluewater season, and a decent wind – I haven’t been fishing much. Decided to head out with Mud and Alice to Leeders creek to try to get some Jewies on the turn of the tide. We both managed to mistime what the tide would be, which meant an hour less fishing, but also an hour less on the incoming tide which was where we expected to get fish.

The catfish were on! At the start of the day it was catfish after catfish, Mud termed the phrase “wading through the catfish” as every now and again we would get a blue salmon, or a goldie. Never got the jew we were aiming for. I hooked something quite large that jumped, but it managed to bite through my 80lb mono leader.

After the turn of the tide the fishing dropped right off. Still the occasional catfish but

Got:
Me: Decent blue salmon
Mud: Slightly smaller blue salmon, impressive black tipped reef shark
Alice: Small goldie
All with lots of catfish!

Story of the trip:
Not sure, my first try at fish cakes with the salmon worked out quite well. Or perhaps not being able to land the largest fish, even though it jumped we didn’t know what it was.

Boat problems:
None for today, after a rather expensive service it was running like a dream.

Snap: