Sweetwater Fishing Forums
General Category => Fishing Reports => Topic started by: Jim_Tait on January 18, 2017, 10:47:56 AM
-
Its become an annual goal of myself and a couple of good fishing/hunting bros from where I live in northern NSW to do trips to central / northern Queensland for the opening and closing week of the barra season. Last October we went all the way to the Herbert River inland from Ingham camped for a week on the river and then moved south back to the Burdekin Floodplain to finish off the season on my old home turf.
Its amazing sharing the driving we got to Townsville in 20 hrs leaving Mullumbimby 10am on a Saturday and into Townsville for a big breaky on the strand the next morning - including three night time /dawn popper session stops on the way (Raglan, Goorganga and Barratta Cks) the last stop 50 ks out of Townsville at 6am producing a keeper barra.
The Herbert River is one of my all time favorite freshwater fishing locations - clean drinkable water, rainforest canopy cool river camps and a heap of willing fish. We did some big hikes up into gorge country and some day long drifts down the river. We caught a million sooties, couple hundred tarpon, couple dozen barra and a couple of sweetwater jacks (and saw a couple of crocs). The barra were all undersized bar one - it seemed the bigger class of fish had already vacated downstream for breeding - although we did get smoked by a couple of things that went bump in the snags one of which I belive was an XOS jack the other likely more decent barra.
Once we moved back to the Burdekin floodplain the size class of fish went up and we scored a few keepers to take home to the family. The mad keen crabber in the group forced us to go downstream to the briny stuff so he could catch a feed of crabs and while there we also got a couple of nice saltwater fish.
All in all a bloody good mission with good mates, life is to short not to make the effort to do it! :youbeauty
-
Some more images...
-
Pictures paint a thousand words here's a few more