ADVENTURE 3

One of my favourite fish to catch is the mighty Barramundi. They thrive in the warm water funnelling down the many river systems across northern parts of Australia.

My Ram 1500 truck makes light work of travelling to the rugged fishing spots that Barra call home.

On this trip, we are fortunate to dodge the rough dirt roads as we make our Barramundi journey to Callide Dam west of Rockhampton.

This water supply has stocked Barramundi for many years and the Barra have grown mighty big.

Accommodation for this trip was a trusty Swag rolled out under a beautiful Poinciana tree. I love this type of trip, as camping out under the stars is a huge favourite of mine.

We slipped the Surtees into the lake and parked the Ram up on the point. No concrete boat ramps here to help, the lack of water in the dam meant that the dams concrete ramp was high and dry way up on the hill.

While you can catch Barramundi in the day the prime bite time tended to be at night, so we sounded out the dam in the day looking for spots and waited till dark to cast our lines.

At 10 pm my mate Blake hooked up to a monster Barra. It jumped several times before heading straight to the boat. We thought we had him but his mighty jump at the boat tore the handle off my net and as he shook his head, cut the line through and was away. Oh my god, what just happened! We shook our heads in disbelief.

Cooking on the boat at night meant we could stay out late to catch more fish. But no more big ones ate our lures.

Fortunately we were able to catch the whole hookup and the battle that took place on our video cameras, so losing the big trophy fish was not such a waste of time.

We hit the lagoon near the dam the next morning with the aim to catch a Saragosa or Barra around the lilli pads but with no more action we headed for home in the Ram.