Peter England from Tully landed this chrome plated 107cm Barra today in Joes Creek. The big girl took a 10 inch mullet fished on the bottom on the incoming tide.
The fishing over the last month has been excellent with plenty of barra coming from the flood plains over the high tides. Big schools of mullet are still coming off the plains on the bigger rides and the barra are there waiting for them.
The good news for the future is the amount of news season Barra about. In all the years I have fished the area I have never seen so many of the baby fish. Its not uncommon to get 5 or 6 young Barra in the cast net on every throw up on the flood plains.

Better late than never. The Little Howard finally hit full speed over the last set of spring tides. I had been for a walk up onto the flood plains and seen the masses of bait up there and new it would have to come out eventually. On the eight meter tide last Saturday  my wife Narelle and I went for a short fish up there and landed a couple of nice fish including a 102cm cracker. The bait had just started to find its way into the river. As the week went on and the tides started to recede the bait started pouring of the flood plains into the river and the Barra just went off. We were hooking onto 15 to 20 fish a day and every boat I spoke to were catching fish. The barra were spewing up masses of Scats when you caught them and were in great condition. As the tides moved into the neaps the fish went quiet, probably full from the feeding frenzy they had had earlier in the week.
Crabs are steady, while down on previous years there is still a good feed to be had

I always maintain the equinox is the start of the run off season and this year has been no exception. Although because of the lack of wet season this year the fishing has not been at its best we have still been getting into some good fishing. On the day off the equinox we bagged 6 barra including a nice 92cm fish and if it wasnt for the pesky bull sharks stealing all of our baits we would have done a lot better. Both high and low tide fishing have been producing and even the neap tides have been good. Fishing on the neaps on Thusday we bagged seven fish and lost a lot more and today on the neaps we bagged 4 fish including a 101cm thunper caught by Dean Robinson.
Crabs have been a little patchy with some days producing good numbers and some days being very tough. The good news now though is they are all pretty full

In what has been the quietest build up i have seen since doing tours in Shoal Bay there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel. The last few weeks has been very encouraging.
The big rain we had in December has got the run off creeks running clean. Usually this first big rain makes the creeks flow muddy but there was enough rain to make them  run clean. While it is still a bit early for these run off creeks to really perform on some of the best tides there has been a bit of action. On one session after the last springs we boated six barra and had a few others missed. A couple of the fish were swamp fish showing the flood plains have a bit of water up there. If we can get a bit more rain over the next month I think we will be in foe a reasonable run off season in Shoal Bay.
Low tide fishing has really picked up in the last couple of weeks with catches of five or more the norm. One trip last week we hooked up to over a dozen fish but inexperienced anglers meant a lot were lost.
Mud crabs are slowly starting to show up in better sizes and are getting fuller by the day

After what has been a long hard dry season finally some good news. Water temps have been slowly rising over the past week and a half and the barra are liking it. With a constant temp of over 25 degrees and even hitting as high as 28 in places the fish are finally staring to get active.
Late last week fishing the low tide in the Little Howard saw us bag couple of nice barra and over the neap tides this week fishing the high tide we managed six fish on Monday and two on Wednesday and losing another five. Friday saw us back in the Little Howard fishing the low and bagging four quality fish.
Really big Blue Salmon have also been common among the catch.
Crabs Have been patchy and got very hard over the neaps but have picked up again as the tides have increased.

To say the fishing has been hard is a understatement. While we have been catching a few fish there have been quite a few days where we havnt managed a bite. There have been a few Blue Salmon about but the Barra have been elusive. One notable catch this week was a 101cm fish by Louise Schwarze from Victoria. Louise commented she would have been happy catching the bait as I tossed out the 15 inch mullet which accounted for the big girl. Louises farther Dennis at lost a couple of fish earlier in the day but this was the only barra we landed for the day.
Crabs are still about but are starting to show signs of slowing as they usually do at this time of year.