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Rockhampton is the start of tropical north Queensland and is the home to one of our great Australian sports fish barramundi. The area also has many other species of fish to catch in the river including King Salmon.

I set out with my son Tom to fish with Craig for a two day session over the weekend and hopefully catch a few barra.

Rockhampton being the beginning of the tropical north was really letting itself down temperature wise as we ventured outside our motel room it was 9 degrees Celsius at first light.

The first day the water temperatures started around the18 degree mark and I was thinking to myself why did we come in the middle of the coldest part of the year. We started fishing with rapala shad raps and every body was on a different colour, I used the glass ghost colour one of my favourites that I use fishing the impoundments. We started fishing up close to the edges as the fish were commonly in tight to the bank and in the first hour I had hooked two fish and dropped one Tommy had also dropped the first fish of the day.  We had found a great spot and noticed plenty of fish in the 20 foot mark on the side scan sounder. With this in mind I worked my shad rap as far down as I could around 10 to 15 feet and slowly let the lure sink onto the fish twitching the lure through the pause to maintain some movement in the lure every twenty to thirty seconds. This worked great for all of us but we wanted to move on to find some larger fish as the first fish we caught were around the 75cm mark.

We moved on searching the mangrove banks casting all the lay downs and I hooked up again a barramundi of around 65cm.This fish was very tight up against the snag and smashed the Shad Rap, the boys tried all the colours but the glass ghost still proved to be the colour that worked. The technique still was to suspend the lure for about thirty to forty seconds the fish just loved that sinking lure with a twitch. I should point out that these shad raps weren’t standard; they were modified with owner No. 4 ST66 hooks attached on the front split ring. This caused the lure to sit forward and sink slowly.

We moved on to a large corner in the river that had large amounts of tidal water flowing, providing a large lee area on the other side of the corner we thought this would be a great place for barra to hide and ambush. We cast our lures in the water and Craig’s lure took of at ninety degrees to the right shooting straight in front of everybodies lures we cleared the lines and gave chase to find we had caught a King Salmon. I had never caught a king salmon before and I had never seen a saltwater crocodile in the wild before all this would change in the forth coming day.

We went on to fish hard and Craig pointed out all the great areas to fish and explained why the fish were there, I should point out that Craig had won three Barra Bounties here one of the more prestigious tournaments around the area, with this in mind and Craig’s understanding of how to use these rapala hard bodied lures it was a steep learning curve for Tommy and myself. I know everybody says it but you always do learn something fishing new places and with other people even us guides.

Craig made great use of his hummingbird side scan sounder, I had shown my side scan to Craig in last years ABT barra tour and explained how they worked and Craig worked out pretty quickly that these sounders are invaluable in impoundment and estuary fishing.

Day two seen us hit the water a little later as it had been so cool the day before, my son was wearing his long pyjama pants just to keep warm. We had a plan this day and we started by fishing were we caught our fish on the first day. We were off to a shakey start but I nailed two straight up the boys were giving me the death stare as I had caught four of the barra the day before. Tommy hooked up and dropped his, Craig by this time was becoming a little flustered by this stage and decided to change his lure to the same one I was using, well you wouldn’t believe it Craig started catching one barra per cast which just seems ridiculous but we had the school close to the boat and it was just one after the other. I had just received a work related phone call and couldn’t concentrate as Tommy and Craig just kept pulling one in after the other, so I had to say I would call my caller back. This was getting beyond ridiculous we had caught over twenty fish and it was only 9.30 am, I said to Craig we should look for some large fish because some of the fish were coming up around the 300mm mark. Tommy being only eleven was very reluctant to move as this was the best barra bite he had ever experienced but he had no choice. So we moved on in the search of larger barra and we found a monstrous croc lying on the bank sunning itself I was amazed that all the people I had seen fishing on the bank and the boat ramps oblivious to this danger. And I may add I didn’t hang around on the boat ramp for to long myself when I had to grab the car when we pulled the boat out later in the day.

We pulled up at the corner were we caught a king salmon the day before and Craig hooked up straight away on a nice kingy about 75cm I said to myself bugger as we had only caught one here the day before but soon enough I hooked my first king salmon and straight after Tommy caught his first also. We went on to catch seven king salmon in total in this one spot and we did take some home for the table. If you have never caught one of these king fish before I highly recommend it they have to be the fastest striking fish I have seen the will put 10m on you in the blink of an eye. We fished all Craig’s favourite haunts all the way back catching barra after barra we were right up in the town reach catching barra in the middle of the city. We decided to leave early as we had caught so many fish and so we returned to the place we started for one last bash were we started our day and we managed to push our total landed barra for the day to 43 and left the river at 3.00pm some may say BS I know I would but it has definitely gone down as one of the best trips that Tommy and I have experienced in our travels. We caught over the two days 49 barramundi and 8 king salmon. We stayed within 10km of the town reach fishing down towards the mouth end. The main lures we used were the rapala shad raps but we also caught some fish on the slick rig 130’s and 110’s and the small storm bait and switch. The shad rap caught over 70 % of the fish though. We worked though all the colours that Rapala produce but the glass ghost was the gun lure. I would suggest that most suspending hard bodied would work in the same situation but the Rapalas for me are, so well finished and have that suspending thing just perfect.

For those of you interested in making the trip it is about 6 hrs drive from Brisbane the accommodation is plenty but books out quickly on the weekends. We paid $115 per night to stay in one of the local hotels that had adequate parking for the boat, but I did see some accommodation that started at around $65 dollars per night in the cabins at the caravan park. I would suggest booking is essential but you do have everything at hand being in the city plenty of good food options take away and eat in, everything is there for the perfect angling adventure without having to rough it.