BARRAMUNDI IN AUSTRALIA

The bite just about ripped the rod out of my hand and in an instant a fish was six feet in the air, jumping on the end of my line. I was doing battle with my first Australian barramundi and it was incredible.

Earlier in the year, fellow Bassmaster Elite Series angler Carl Jocumsen, who is from Australia, invited me over to participate in a few ABT (Australia Barra Tour) events. In an instant, my wife Shelby and I said we were in for this bucket-list trip down under. I was able to spend ten days fishing for these big, awesome fish and then we took in all that we could over another ten days along the east coast of Australia.

The Fishing

I’ve said it a few times now but the best way I can describe these fish is that they can jump seven feet in air and they would pull a musky backwards. We found out right away that if you had any weakness in your equipment, these fish would ex- ploit it. We had split rings open up, hooks jacked, even the wires ripped out of our swimbaits. We were using 80 lb fluorocarbon leaders when we started and they would chew through that, even without having much more for teeth than a smallmouth bass does. They are just powerful fish and when they clamped down on your line and started jumping, they could chew it off. After some lost fish over the first few days, we beefed up everything and increased our landing percentage.

Barramundi are a saltwater fish that have been stocked in several freshwater reservoirs in Australia, which is where we fished. They call these reservoirs “dams” in Australia and most are relatively small waterbodies compared to what we are used to in Canada. We fished three different dams during our trip (Kinchant, Temburra and Faust) and they were each a few kilometers by a few kilometers in size.

Doing some research before we went over, I learned that many of the same tech-

Every fish catch was an adventure. You had to hook eight to ten to land five niques that we use for bass will catch barra as well — swimbaits, jerkbaits, topwaters. You would think let’s just bring the musky tackle over but while they are big, aggressive fish, you need to bring some finesse to the table if you want to get bites, so most of the tackle we used was simply heavy bass stuff. Think flipping sticks, 50 lb braided mainline and then the 100 pound fluorocarbon leaders. Some of the anglers over there were using heavy spinning gear as well, with 5000 sized reels.

The Tournaments

Carl and I competed in four different events while we were over there and we actually did pretty good, fishing against the best barramundi anglers in Australia. We took a 3rd at Temburra, 6th at Kinchant, an 18th and a 6th at Faust. All of the events had around 40 teams competing.

The tournaments were similar to our bass tournaments in many ways, with teams fishing for a five fish limit of barra

(which we measure in the boat and then release). Three of the tournaments were eight hours events (4pm to midnight), while one was a 16-hour “all-nighter”, from 4pm to 8am. Before the all-nighter, which is the tournament where we finished 18th, the tournament organizer gave us a couple of sleeping bags in case we wanted to take a rest during the night. I figured I’d be able to just power through but we both ended up sleeping for a few hours. It was a grinder, believe me!

The reason for the late hours for the tournaments was it was hot during the day, with temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius and the barra would actually bite better after dark. In Canada we don’t typically fish at night so that was different but I enjoyed it. We had a good moon throughout the trip which made it fairly easy to see out there and then we’d wear a headlamp that we could switch on if we needed to net a fish or re-tie a line.

Most of the fish were in the 18-30 pound range but they could get up to 50 pounds. We would measure the fish in centimeters on a “brag mat”, take a photo and then release them. A “good” one would crack the 100 cm line. An average barra was in the 80-90 cm range. The best one that I caught during the trip was a 104 cm fish, while Carl caught a couple of 109’s one night when we were practicing. The big fish caught during the events were in the 110-115 cm range.

Australia

It was the best fishing trip I’ve ever been on. If we had barramundi in Canada, I probably wouldn’t fish for anything else! The bites were savage and after you caught one, you just wanted to catch another one. The people over there was top-notch as well. The tournament anglers were all great, offering to help us out, giving us tips and always having a cold beer ready at the end of the fishing activities. They are awesome people.

Away from the fishing, Shelby and I were able to visit the Australia Zoo in Brisbane, which is operated by the late Steve Irwin’s family. We were able to get up close with kangaroos and koala bears, which was fun. We took a scenic flight over the Great Barrier Reef on our last day there, which was amazing. Getting to fish out there will be on the bucket-list the next time we go over there!

The food in Australia is superb, with the best fruit and seafood I’ve ever had. The coffee is also the best I’ve had. You don’t see any drip-coffee machines over there like we use in North America, instead most coffee is made with an espresso machine — it was so good. It really was the trip of a lifetime.

If anybody is looking to go on a oncein-a-lifetime trip, consider Australia. While we didn’t do the saltwater thing, there are some incredible saltwater fishing opportunities as well. n