Tinaroo Dam, on North Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands, is fast becoming renown as the most productive and exciting impoundment fishery in the country. Originally noted for its population of mega sooties, XOS barra are now coming on line and after a lot of trial and error, techniques are being developed to tangle with these trophies.
NESTLED in the hills behind Cairns lies a fishery with possibly the best potential in the country. Damming the Barron River on the Atherton Tablelands lies Tinaroo Dam. Through the late eighties and early nineties, Tinaroo’s huge sooty grunter stole the spotlight, giving anglers the chance of record sized fish in a very accessible fishery. Now, the fruits of Tinaroo's continuous barra stocking program is bearing big, ballistic fruit. Slowly but surely, lure fishing techniques targeting these barra (already recorded to at least 70 lb) are proving successful. How big will these fish get and how do you get a piece of the action? Read on.
Lake Tinaroo was formed by a dam, constructed across the Barron River close to the township of Tinaroo Falls. Like a lot of popular angling impoundments, its catchment runs mainly through agricultural land and most of the shoreline is either cultivated or used for grazing.
There's an amazing 270 km of shoreline and a smorgasbord of inlets and backwaters that can all potentially yield trophy fish. Barra have been stocked in the dam yearly since 1985.
Currently anglers can target barramundi (averaging a metre in length), sooty grunter (to over six kg), sleepy cod to three kilos, archer fish to a kilo and red claw crayfish, with the potential for mangrove jacks in the years to come.
Tinaroo has just been through the first of three years' worth of trial fishing through the closed barramundi season, with extremely encouraging results. Tinaroo is a shining model for the stocking and management of northern impoundments, so when Cairns local David McAtamney offered to host a weekend on the dam, how could I possibly refuse?
BREAKING THE TINAROO DUCK
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The barra that broke the Tinaroo duck for the author. It took a diving minnow on a moonlit night in a quiet backwater. The taking of these impoundment fish is encouraged to the extent of that the closed barra season is now not applicable to the impoundment.
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For at least the fiftieth time the loaded lure landed up "the alley". I’d become quite relaxed and had watched the loaded lure splash-down in the moonlight. The water was dead still. Light mist rose from the silvery surface and combined with the silhouette of scattered standing timber to make the scene somewhat surreal. The previous hour’s casting, while providing a couple of encouraging boils, had not yielded any solid takes. I was still unaware of the consequences of a hookup.
“The alley” was a five metre wide zone through which feeding barra would pass as they moved along this particular arm of the dam. Defined by shallow, weedy, snag ridden margins on both sides and a narrow channel of four or five feet in depth, it provided ideal conditions to hook, if not actually land a barra. It was easy to slip into a routine with the slow, stop-start retrieve that my host, David, recommends for these fish. Then it happened.
As I raised the rod tip to impart another burst of action to the lure, it was violently wrenched in the opposite direction. A six foot wide boil on the moonlit surface and bursts of protest from the redline drag reinforcing the power of my opponent. Suddenly the six feet of heavy leader material and overloaded bass rod seemed like flimsy tools indeed. A metre of impoundment barra made a series of short, impossibly powerful runs, stopping only once to shake its head.
The fight was over in fifteen seconds, the extra strong trebles tearing from their lodgings. I’d be lying if I said that I was in control at any stage of the fight. At close range and at tight quarters, the barra was literally unstoppable. A metre of bronze backed impoundment barra was free to continue on its nightly course through the shallows and weedy margins.
It became difficult to continue the slow, stop/start retrieve at the correct speed. I’m told that the adrenalin rush often outlasts the duration of a close range, shallow water barra encounter, and the next few rushed retrieves seemed to support this statement. At David’s advice, I took a couple of deep breaths and relaxed the retrieve to the required speed. I could tell that he answered my rhetorical gabble with a smile.
Ten minutes later, after I had resumed a comfortable cast and retrieve position, it happened again. This time the take was much closer to the boat.
The barra made a poor move straight away. It swam under the boat and out into open water, again peeling line easily against a heavy drag. Twenty seconds into the fight, it realised its mistake and headed towards the nearest shore. Luckily, the chosen bank was steep and offered only pencil thin twigs, Salvinia and duckweed for protection. Holding the rod high, the long, heavy shock leader proved its worth and as the fish charged under the weedy cover parallel to the bank, sickening shudders transmitting through the line. A desperate double thumb lock arced the tiring barra into the open again and towards the boat.
David handed me the ten kilo fish. Hooking and landing a barra like this in a shallow, moonlit, weedy backwater, must be one of the greatest challenges in Australian freshwater fishing. It certainly left any other impoundment experience I’ve had well in its wake.
Finishing the night with two fish in the boat was a bonus. David landed an acrobatic fifteen kilo specimen twenty minutes later. All up, four hours fishing was punctuated with short bursts of activity. We hooked up around a third of the fish that showed interest in the lures and of those we landed two out of three. As the usual ratio of hookups to landed fish is around five to one , luck was on our side.
TACKLE
On a good night, losing four out of five fish can be expensive, as well as ego shattering. Rumour has it that Cairns legend Laurie Woodbridge (who, I’ve heard, can catch fish in a dish of dog water) batted none from nine on a balmy November evening. Luckily, he brought along the cunning cane farmer, John Mondora, to save face and boat their forty pounder for the evening.
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David McAtamney had probably line fished as many barra in Tinaroo as anyone. This metre long fish is a typical capture and hits the scales at around 15 kg.
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David McAtamney has landed his fair share of Tinaroo barra and has the honour of owning tag and certificate #00001 for a fish of 1005 mm (17.6 kg) taken under Tinaroo’s unique regulations in the closed season on November the 1st, 1996. After years of experimentation, his technique has helped him to better the ratio of fish hooked to fish landed in Tinaroo waters.
One way to keep luck on your side is to make sure that your terminal tackle is up to the task at hand. As these Tinaroo barra have grown and grown, David tells me that he has lost these fish in nearly every way known to man (and even a couple of ways that are known only to fish!).
Most purist freshwater anglers would be unfamiliar with the use of wire. Those planning to target Tinaroo’s barra (or, in fact, barra from any of the northern impoundments that will come on line in the future) must include a foot of wire between line and lure. You must. Hey - I, too, was sceptical until I examined the state of the wire trace after being connected to my first fish for only fifteen seconds. The nylon coating on the 40 pound sevenstrand was completely shredded. David says that they can slice through 60 pound mono leader in a matter of a seconds if given the chance.
If you hook one of these barra in the mouth, the head rattling jumps subject the line directly above the lure to the fish’s razor sharp operculum. If the fish swallows the lure (and I don’t think that there is a lure around that they can’t) then the rasping action of the crushing plates and sandpaper-like mouths will also come into play. Double swage the wire directly to the lure. Remove any split rings present.
Fish of this size have a habit of straightening trebles, especially when fishing with a redline drag in tight situations. If the split rings on the lure are sub-standard, replace these at the same time as you add XXX strong Eagle Claw trebles.
A long double connected to a long leader is mandatory. As well as copping a lot of flack from the fish, the leader offers added protection from the shallow, weedy environment in which these fish are currently targeted.
Preferred lures are minnows, similar in size to the bony bream that make up the major proportion of the fishes' diet. Anything from 6 to 15 cm have been used successfully. There is a mile of potential for experimentation with surface lures and flies and I'm sure that successful techniques will emerge for this style of angling. At the moment, though, minnows produce the goods.
Line classes are a personal choice, but consider six kilo as a minimum if you aren’t chasing records. Speaking of records, Tinaroo is presently the only place in Queensland where you can legally keep a barramundi over the maximum size limit of 120 cm - a boon to those intent on seeing their name on the record charts. Already, Jack Leighton, a keen and successful local angler, has several records. If a big barra bolts into open water, you have a chance of landing it on tackle as light as two kilo.
At your end of the line, ensure that you drag is firm but smooth. A quality baitcasting or threadline outfit that is capable of delivering the aforementioned rig is necessary. To me, baitcasters seem a better tool to handle the stand-up battles that I have witnessed. My trusty 3-piece Loomis C662 seemed a little light at the time, but it could comfortably deliver the cast after cast needed to connect.
Remember to take a whopping landing net or decent sized gaff if you intend to take these fish (it is encouraged). These big barra fight so hard and they are so difficult to handle that most XOS fish released by anglers die anyway (Alf Hogan, pers. comm.).
TECHNIQUES
Currently, the hours between late afternoon and early morning are the preferred times to tangle with trophy barra in Tinaroo. Especially favoured is the week before the full moon. If you can time the trip to coincide with the build up to the spawning season, then all the better. A metre long fish (which is standard for the dam) that would weigh 17 to 18 kg in the Spring, may only tip the scales at 15 kg at the end of Summer.
Also, fish in late spring (October and November are prime months) seem to be very aggressive. David says that on a good night in November you have every chance of connecting with several of these beasts in a single night.
At the moment, preferred areas to fish centre around shallow, weedy backwaters adjacent to deeper channels. Barra move up into these arms of the dam and into the shallows to feed under the cover of darkness. Successful Tinaroo addicts such as David and Jack choose to anchor quietly in a defined `fish lane' and cast repetitively to the same spot until a fish (or school of fish) passes or is aggravated to strike. Quietness is of the essence, as David reckons that excess or unnatural noise definitely sends the fish into deeper water and away from the strike zone. The nature of the country being fished means that when a fish is hooked, there's usually only one way to go - up - with thirty pounders having jumped up to ten times during a fight.
There's no sense explaining fighting tactics before you've hooked the fish, is there? Retrieve techniques for Tinaroo have been developed by David to a fine art, and while a straight retrieve will produce fish, I've witnessed first hand the effectiveness of a stop-start technique.
The nature of the rigging of your lure means that it should be approaching neutral buoyancy, or even a slow sink in freshwater and this fact is integral to David's successful retrieve. After placing a (another!) cast into your chosen zone, lift the rod tip sharply from parallel to perpendicular to the water's surface. This imparts a burst of action to the minnow. Drop the rod tip back to water level as you retrieve the line. This lets the lure sit, motionless, in the water. As you come up tight to the artificial, repeat the technique with another upward jig. David says that the barra's attack response is usually triggered as the lure stops or as it starts to move after the pause.
From my (limited) experience, the retrieve is dynamite. It's just hard to keep the slow and steady pace when a six foot boil corrupts the surface in the same position that your mind's eye envisages your erratic morsel!
It seems that the barra are a highly mobile fish in these shallow arms and the first cast is just as likely as the hundredth to be engulfed.
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Scattered timber and shallow weedy bays and edges hold vast amounts of food for Tinaroo's barra and they can be targeted in these areas under the cover of darkness.
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As with surface lures, the potential for fly fishing is wide open. The natural stripping action of a fly fisho simulates the deadly stop-start retrieve of current techniques. Imitating a bony bream (or, in the future, a gar) will be no problem for experienced tiers. They'll just have to remember to incorporate the wire trace into the equation!
Once you've been hit and the heart rate hits 200 beats per minute, there's only one way to fight these fish - and that's hard. On the hookup, these fish typically go bezerk and usually expend a whole lot of energy in a short period of time. The fish that we hooked at night seemed very confused and fought with no real pattern. It was if they didn't know where to run. David says that the fish he's hooked in the daylight hours are an entirely different proposition and they can brick you, uncontrollably, in the blink of an eye. So, fight them hard, keep them off balance and hope that your terminal tackle is up to the task.
The potential exists also for targeting these fish in the daylight hours by trolling methods commonly used in southern impoundments. Barra like warmth and I doubt that they would frequent the cold, deep water below the thermocline. Find a way to take these fish consistently in the daylight and you'll have unbelievable fishing.
HOW BIG IS BIG?
DPI researchers have electrofished barra to 35 kg in Tinaroo. Fish have been lure caught and released to 127 cm. Over the `closed season', the heaviest recorded capture was 22.5 kg. Capture statistics for the first open, closed season show the average size of fish taken to be 89 cm and 10.5 kg. That's a 23 pound plus fish.
Remember that these fish are a maximum of 9 years old. By sometime not long after the year 2000, Tinaroo should be home to hundred pound fish. That's a scary proposition on baitcast or fly gear, but I'm sure there will be a flood of anglers willing to take up the challenge.
A RISING STAR
According to Alf Hogan of Walkamin DPI, barra will be only one (even if the major) drawcard for the impoundment. Snub nosed gar are about to be liberated in Tinaroo, providing another angling species as well as a valuable additional food source for the barra, sooties and jacks.
That's right, mangrove jack are also on Tinaroo's waiting list and since the techniques for their artificial spawning have been recently elucidated, their introduction should not be too far away. While maybe not as fast growing as the barra, jacks should still pack on the pounds and it's a safe bet that their first run will defeat many an angler.
Alf reckons that 30 to 50 pound fish aren't out of the question. At the very least it will be an interesting experiment.
At the moment, the best estimate is that the dam is carrying over 200,000 barra and that this figure is well short of its potential carrying capacity.
Tinaroo has been religiously stocked with barra every year, thanks to donations from hatcheries, the QDPI and, of course, an active and energetic fish stocking society.
WHAT ABOUT THE SOOTIES?
Sooties have been stocked more erratically and of late the XOS specimens that were a trademark of the dam have been increasingly difficult to find. This situation is being addressed by the Tablelands Stocking Society and currently they are working closely with the DPI at Walkamin at perfecting a home based grow-out system.
Viable larvae are transferred from the DPI hatchery to the Society, and members take the responsibility into their own hands. Their last batch of 30,000 sooty grunter fingerlings cost them 0.1 c each and a lot of TLC.
During my trip I visited Cec Langton's house (just one of the group's keen members) and witnessed the success of the program. 150,000 sooty grunter post-larvae goggled at me from the shaded, bio-filtered backyard tank. Their next few meals were bubbling away in the mini Artemia hatchery a few metres away and a generator provided insurance against power loss and the loss of his babies.
POTENTIAL TRAGEDY
The biggest worry for the members of the Stocking Society is whether the barra will all head over the spillway at the first opportunity. I'm sure that such a large concentration of female barra will experience the urge to reproduce and therefore seek to travel downstream. Between Cyclone Joy (December 1990) and the present, the fish simply haven't had the opportunity to take the dive, but rest assured, the journey of a thirty pound barra over the spillway ends unhappily. To lose such a valuable resource in such a way would be tragic for everyone involved in the project, as well as the Tablelands in general. Tinaroo is destined to become a major tourist drawcard.
Action is currently being taken to devise a system that stops this from happening, but whether it will work or even be in place by the time the dam spills over, who's to know?
CHANGING THE LAW
Starting on the 1st November, 1995 barramundi from Tinaroo became exempt from Queensland’s barramundi closed season, which extends through the Summer, re-opening on the 1st of February the following year. Additionally, barra exceeding the 120 cm maximum size limit are allowed to be taken year-round. The proviso is that fish must be taken to one of three official tagging stations and recorded, weighed, measured and tagged with a DPI marker. The captor then receives a certificate to commemorate their capture, making tagging desirable and giving the angler a permanent record of the fish.
Data from this first closed season program is extremely valuable to the management of the fishery.
The policy is justified by the facts that these fish will never contribute to a breeding population (unless in a hatchery), be it in the breeding season and/or as a huge, gravid female.
The initial trial of the system is for three years and by that stage, other North Queensland impoundments will be due to come on line.
Tagging stations are located at three points around the dam, Kairi, Tinaroo Falls and Yungaburra and it is an offence to take untagged barra from the dam in the closed season, or untagged barra bigger than 120 cm at any time of the year.
The minimum size limit of 58 cm still applies as well as the bag limit of 5 fish per person.
Remember, this is a put and take fishery and the taking of big barra is encouraged.