barrabait

Thanks for the info everyone. Im keen to give it a go. I'll let yous know if i get the hang of it and catch a few fish. ;D barrabait

Thanks for the info Basspro48. I'll give pitching a go. barrabait

Ok it's my turn to ask a question or two. I read SneakySnooks post on his best bass caught "pitching". What the heck is pitching? Is it possible to explain it to me or will I have to come over there and go fishin with one of you blokes to learn. I will be fishing on a lake in two weeks with Aussie Bass in it and Im keen to try out this pitching thing especially if it catches big bass. Also are your lakes stocked with bass or do they breed naturally in the impoundments. Our bass need brackish/salt water to breed so the fish in the impoundments can not breed. Thanks. barrabait

Ok this is my little girl. Look a bit plain compaired to some of the orsm rigs in your pic's but I love her just the same. I have a 40hp 4-stroke Yammy pushing her. darren.

bugged up and sent the same pic twice,,sorry. C YA Darren.

Some more sooty's

Ok another couple of pics, First one is my PB barra caught 15 minutes after my young fella got his best fish. We were working around a weed bed in less then 3 mtrs of water just after the sun set. The next is of another caught on a soft swim bait just before sun up.

While Im at it I may as well post a pic of a barra we caught this morning. Ben is new to the area and by a chance meeting I discovered he is a keen fisherman. Haveing never caught a barra before I offered to take hime out to see if we could add barra to his fishing list. We done it tough with 5 fish hooked but every one of them cleared the water shaking there heads and managed to throw the lure. Finally in around 4 foot of water in standing timber Ben nailed this fish. Took some getting in as it stiched us up in the timber fairly good but with a lot of luck we bullied it out and now Ben has a new species to his list. darren.

This one is a Yellowbelly. Part of the perch family of native fish here. The pic is from a few years back. thats my son with his bigest fish ever. The next pic is of my boy a bit older and a lot wiser in the fishing game with his NEW BEST EVER fish. It,s a meter long Barra, caught a ferw weeks ago. hope you enjoy the pics.

This is a pic of a Saratoga. These things go balistic and jump out of the water when hooked. Very popular with the fly fisher's. We catch a fair few on hard body and soft plastic lures. they are a surface feeder. This would only be about half the size they grow to.

G-day again. Bout time I sent in a couple of Aussie bass pics instead of barra ones. Sorry about the quallity of the pics as they have been scaned from photos from the old camera. Cant find the disc with the digi pics yet.

Hey fishinaz, I have caught two fish at the same time on the same lure twice now. Once a rather large catfish tried to nick the lure out of a sootys mouth and I ended up with the two stuck together for a short time untill the sooty got off and I landed the catty. Second time it was two small sootys together. Different sort of fish to your bass but I think the second fish you seen had the same idear of nickin a quick meal from his neighbour. Darren.

Must be a lucky Jacket. One of my mates with his first impoundment sooty wearing my jacket. Eungella dam is around 550 meters above sea level so the temp is a little cooler in the mornings compaired to where I live on the coast 2 hours drive away. I live by the ocean but never fish the salt as the fresh water fishing around here is too good. Darren

Crikey my spellin aint to good

Ok ,something different. This is a pic of Sooty grunter. they are a super agressive fish and will attack almost any lure you throw near them. Smaller then a barra but they pull like a freight train. Surface lures work well untill the sun hits the water and then I switch to soft plastics so I can sink the lure down to the depth the fish are holding at. Spinnerbaits work well but I dont use them a often. Wild sootys in our local rivers can be caught through out the day on small hard bodied lures but the impoundment fish seem to shut down around 8am. Our trick to finding the sootys is to look for trees that have the local water birds roosting in them all night. The birds crap in the water all night and the bait fish rise to the surface to feed on the crap, then the sootys come up and smash the bait fish. So when one of the birds does its business into the water usually a few seconds later we see a swerl on the surface of the water. Chuck ya lure close to the swirl and a millisecond later your on to a sooty. Sort of cheating using the birds as a sign post but hey the goal is to catch fish so I use any means I can to increase my chanses. Catfish are also in the rivers so we catch a few of them as well. The ouch in this pic is a 4/0 hook impailed in my finger. The fish spun around as I was removing it from the landing net and I got hooked up to the lure. Took a fair bit of effort to push it all the way through my finger to get it out. The hook went in beside my fingernail and the poind just broke the shin in the middle of the finger. Getting it out the way it went in was not going to happen so I pushed it all the way through. Good thing Iv got a good supply of blood as I let a fair bit of it out when the hook came out :'(. Darren

A bit closer to an average size barra Darren.

I didnt take these pics but it gives you and Idear of why we love these fish. The fish is around the size of the two in my pics catch ya later. darren.

Back again, Im glad you like the barra shots. The one in daylight is actually a bigger fish in length by 2 inches. I think the angle Im holding the barra at night makes it look larger. Night fishing with no moon light is a lot of fun. blind casting into the darkness retreiving the lure dead slow keeping it just under the surface. And when these fish hit they usually clear the water trying to throw the lure. Orsm sight in the daylight, just have to follow the splashing in the dark. Yee Harrr. Both these fish are on the larger size Bass-Hammer but still not as big as they are catching at the moment. Average size is from 18inches to 24inches. Bit hard for me to work in imperial measurments. One thing I noticed on your sight you all talk weight with the fish you catch. We tend to talk length. Even fish of this size are ok to eat Matt-Fly but I reckon they are better to catch then to eat.

Ok the Barra worked now I'll find some Sooty's and Bass and post them later. Darren

how bout this

G-day everyone, thanks for the welcome. If you check out the web site www.ausfish.com.au you will find plenty of photos of Barra and Sooty grunter. The site is much the same as this one here. Go to the fresh water photo section and look for Teemburra, Peter Faust, Monduran, Awonga and Eungella. They are all stocked impoundments ausfish members fish and post shots of the fish they catch. I go buy the name of Staggy. The fish are for both food and sport. They are stocked to help take the pressure of our wild stocks as the Barra are a much sort after eating fish. Barramundi in my opinion are a much better sports fish then a table fish. Not sure on the sooty as a food but they are heaps of fun to catch. On a good day my son and I can catch up to 30 sootys on lures for around 3 hours on the water. then again we could spend 3 hours and catch nothing the next trip round. Stocking the dams also brings tourists in to the area improving the local economy. Southen anglers in the cooler parts of Australia spend all there time dreaming about catching Barramundi in the tropics and once they had to travel to Cairns just to be in with a chance of nailing a nice fish. Now with the stocked impoundments they only have to travel around 5 hours north of Briabane to experience some unbeleivable fishing. We have a closed season on our wild stock of barramundi from the 1st of November to the 1st of February, but you can still chase them in our dams all year round. They do slow down in winter and most fishos dont bother targeting them untill spring. Sootys go hard cold or hot weather. Well Im just home from a 12 hour night shift at work so I should get some sleep. It's 4.45am here at the moment. catch you all later. Darren.

G-day everyone, stumbled across your site a while back and decided to have a bit of a look around. very interesting site. I fish for Australian bass here in Queensland on much the same lures to the gear you use. Im just getting in to Berkly and Atomic soft plastics and Im haveing a fair amount of success so far. I have a 7 hour drive to the closest bass impoundment so we only fish it a couple of times a year. My local dams hold stocked Barramundi and Sooty Grunter so we chase them year round. The Barra grow in excess of 1 metre,,, 25kg's plus and the Sootys up to half a metre maybe 2 to 4 kg's. . Typical Barra gear is a 4 to 8kg rod coupled with a good quality overhead spoolled with 30 to 50lb braid running a metre of 60lb mono leader. sounds like over kill on the line class but if you seen the areas we have to bully the fish out of you would see why we need the extra line strength. A metre barra heading in the opposite direstion through sunked timber is one heck of a lot of fun. My 16 year old son landed his first mtr barra last weekend and I managed my best so far of 1.12mtrs. Most common size caught around here would fall between 60cm to 85cm. Any way just thought I'd drop you's a line to say g-day and I will keep comming back to see what you's have been catching. Tight lines everyone. Darren.