Rocky Barra Bounty

MY brother Chris and I have just returned from the Rocky Barra Bounty, which is held annually in Rockhampton.

We had an absolute ball up there, catching up with a few old mates and meeting new ones as well.

We represented TT Lures in the competition, which gave us an excellent opportunity to try out a couple of recently released products on the Fitzroy River barramundi. The Barra Bounty is a really well run competition, with a long list of anglers still queuing to get into the 70-team cut-off. It’s a two-person team event and is all catch, tag and release.

Every eligible fish is quickly tagged, photographed and put back in with the tagging information being phoned back to headquarters shortly after capture. The event runs for two and a half days, which gives you plenty of time to cover as much area as you want.

Quite a few eligible species are in the competition including barramundi, king threadfin salmon, blue threadfin salmon, barred javelin, dusky flathead, mangrove jack, fingermark, blackspot cod and goldspot cod. The boundaries give anglers a huge amount of water to cover. The city stretch is always popular during the competition and often produces stonker barra.

From here, the entire Fitzroy River is on offer, including the large expanse of rivers and creeks that makes up Port Alma and the Narrows.

This gives every team the opportunity to find their own little barramundi honey hole. A number of popular areas on the Fitzroy definitely see a lot of attention, but plenty of less-fished snaggy and rocky banks are worth a cast or two as you head out towards the mouth. During the couple of days we gave ourselves to pre-fish before the comp, we spent more time looking around than fishing.

Chris and I previously fished the barra bounty a few years back but had mainly stuck to the city reaches with mixed results. This year we put in plenty of hours using our sounders to find new ground up past Nerimbera boat ramp.

We only travelled up to the cut-through from here because further on the water resembled a chocolate milkshake.

Some of the country through that stretch looks amazing though, with rock pile after rock pile coming out of deep water.

We also sounded up deep rock bars that ran for several hundred metres, but we really struggled to get a bite. Plenty of snaggy mud banks needed more attention too, so we decided to start the comp in these reaches.

The briefing was on the Friday night this year, with a rest day on the Saturday and start time at 6am on the Sunday. The tides determined these specific times. Smaller tides seem to be most people’s preference in the area due to an increase in water clarity and the ability to fish some of the deeper edges without large amounts of tidal run. We stayed at the riverside caravan park in a cabin with my old mate and fellow BNB scribe Gary Churchward and his fishing buddy Phil.

The weather forecast for the competition was far from inviting, with 20-25-knot southeasterly wind looking at making things really tough. We did it tough on the first day of the Barra Bounty. The Fitzroy River is very different to the rivers we are used to. It seems to be a lot more like a river in far north Queensland or the Northern Territory than what we are used to in southeast Queensland.

The water is actually cleaner on a run-out tide than on a run in. This is most likely due to the enormous mud flats towards the mouth of the river, which bring the discolouration through as the tide pushes over them. Unfortunately we only got to see about half an hour of cleaner water on the first morning before a torrent of brown filth came roaring back in.

We worked a lot of the deeper back eddies with every lure in our boat before finally retreating back towards the city reaches for the afternoon with our tails between our legs. Chris put a couple of king threadfin in the boat to get us going but we stayed on the barra doughnut for day one.