Matt has been champing at the bit to go fishing again and with the first weekend with some decent weather for a while, today was our chance.  Considering that the boat really isn’t getting used due to either:

• the weather
• Jacinda’s shifts
• work

I’m sort of getting keen to start using it as the main outing has been the trip to Karumba back in late June and that saw it in the water more during that week than the whole year so far for any of the reasons above.

As the tide was on the run up through to about 12:00pm today, I wasn’t in any hurry and wanted to be leaving by about 10:30am to 11:00am allowing an hour or so to gather live bait and then settle into a spot in the Barron River.  I was quite happy to target Bream or any other species that happened to cross our paths, but the main thing was to give Matt a good day on the water in his first serious trip.

We pulled up to my favourite spot to gather bait in the Barron and it didn’t disappoint, yielding some good size bananna prawns on the first cast.  We cast for about 45 minutes and had more than enough prawns for the 3 hours maximum that I wanted to get Matt to stay out for.  Some of the prawns were good eating size as well, I figured that we had enough for good feed of them as well.

So with a good stock of live bait we headed out to the sand flats at the mouth of the Barron River hoping to find some predators cruising the flats.  The sounder showed nothing on it but we anchored up anyway as this is more of a transient area and with a 2m movement over the tide change, it could be worth a shot with live bait anyway.   Not long after this Matt felt the need for the packet of Twisties that we brought along.

Hungry work this fishing...

After about 45 minutes there was nothing showing any real interest; I had some activity on my line with my live prawn being taken but nothing to write home about.  After my bait got taken, Matt decided that a live prawn would be the go and asked that i get him one from the bucket.  I grabbed one and placed it on the hook which he was quite pleased with:

Live Barron River prawn

We spent about another 20 minutes here with no success so we then moved to the mouth of a creek that I knew and sat there just off the mouth at the junction of the Barron and the creek.  In the past I’ve had Bream, Salmon and it is supposed to be a good spot for Barra; not so for the latter today with a 23 degree water temperature, but the other two were a good chance if they were around.

We sat there for another hour and there was nothing doing so we decided to up anchor and  move on.  Matt was enjoying his time on the water and was still talking about the prawns that we caught earlier, he even had it down pat checking his live bait every 20 minutes to see if it was still there:

Getting into it like a pro!

He had seen other boats trolling up and down the river over the course of our time on the water and wanted to have a go at that as well.  After I agreed to set him up with a lime green and orange Rapala minnow that I had in the tackle box, we pulled up anchor moved out closer to the mouth to troll back along the bank.  He commented that his little rod was heavy and that he thought that there was a fish on it as the rod was bucking a bit; I told him that I had set the drag so that if he did get a hit it would let out line and he’d hear the ‘zzzzzz’ sound that all fishos love

Matt, your on!!

After about 20 minutes of rolling, he agreed that it wasn’t working so we pulled up and he started reeling in the Rapala, then his mouth dropped and the reel screamed, “zzzzzzz” to which I yelled, Matt – you’re on, wind it in!.

He started winding in and then he said that it didn’t feel heavy again, so I told him to keep winding anyway, a second or so later, the drag took off again, the fish had come back for a second shot at the little Rapala.  All of a sudden his line went limp and he’d lost the fish this time for good and my $20.00 Rapala

Still it was worth the $20 to see the look on his face when the fish hit; I still think it was a cod that hammered the lure head first and inhaled the leader and it’s teeth cutting through his braid like a knife through butter.  On the way back we decided that we would have another crack at the prawns as the tide seemed to be not too far off the levels that it had been previously.

We had a good time.

Good job that we did as we managed to get some more good size bananna prawns and at least we would go home with something for the day.  Not counting the cost of the Rapala (not that I’m bitter about it, losing one of them hurts though), the day cost us about $20 including boat fuel for about 4 hours on the water away from computers and getting outdoors, the pair of us covered in mud from cast netting.  At roughly $5 per hour; you can’t beat this and the photo above shows that Matt also had a good time, so that figure comes down to $2.50 per hour – simply priceless!

The prawns that we ended up catching, once I had chance to bag them up, we had managed just under 1Kg of fresh prawns and at around the $20 per kilogram mark, the day was pretty much break even give or take a few dollars; but the enjoyment that Matt had today you can’t put a dollar value on that.

Just under 1Kg of fresh bananna prawns

The prawns were mixed in their size and tomorrow I’ll go through them and size them for bait or food, but there should be a good selection for both.