Fishing tour of the gulf and King Ash Bay

Leaving Lawn Hill by the northern exit meant driving through piles of bull dust, more rough potholed roads and loads of river crossings. Kingfisher Camp was a lovely green oasis with fishing opportunities and lots of new birds. We rode our bikes to Goose Swamp for more birdwatching and some up close and personal experience with bull dust. 

From Kingfisher Camp our first river crossing confused us because we couldn’t work out where we would emerge from the water. Turns out you drive along the river for a while and then find a road at the end. We cautiously walked it first – cautiously because of the unknown-ness of it and because there could be crocs.

 

More bull dust, rough roads and steep river crossings. Felt like a Skittles advert – if you touched the bull dust on the car, the whole lot would avalanche down the car like water.

We drove along the southern edge of the gulf – very different to my expectations – I thought it would be muddy with mosquitoes but it’s very dry except for the occasional river that had water in it. It was certainly the road less travelled – some days we saw more abandoned vehicles than we saw cars driving on the road.

We did the fishing tour of the rivers of the gulf – some big rivers and lots of little streams that passed through paperbarks and pandanus. When possible we stopped and fished and sometimes stayed the night at a pull in near the river. This meant we could fish before and after dinner and sometimes before breakfast. Russ caught 4 massive barramundi one night about 2km upstream from the Calvert crossing – they all busted him off with their razor sharp gills but it was a massive buzz for him. Apparently they only have a 10 second memory but they didn’t succumb the next morning so maybe their memory is a bit longer than 10 seconds.

As we were approaching one crossing, a ute driven by a farm worker, charged down from another road from the right and sped through the river. Lucky we weren’t in their way!!

Borroloola (love saying that name) was a very sad town with townships on the outskirts and piles of glass and cans beside the road. You couldn’t buy wine at all and beer only after 2pm with ID. From here we headed to King Ash Bay to check the fishing. We thought about the houseboat option to explore the enormous estuary system and decided to splurge for 3 nights. It was fabulous – caught 2 large Barramundi, some black jewfish, mangrove jack and queen fish and some delicious mud crabs. It was very peaceful being along in the river at sunrise and sunset..a little spooky waking up and finding ourselves on mudflats at 1am and not sure whether to be amused, angry or frightened when we returned after our morning’s fishing at the mouth of the river in the tinny to find out houseboat absent. It had worked itself loose from the anchor and gone upstream!! The trip was another big fishing buzz for Russ. We both enjoyed finding some new birds including the striated heron and the “uncommon” large billed heron, sacred kingfisher and Caspian tern. Saw a few large crocs and an enormous grouper as Russ was on a muddy patch trying to catch live bait with a cast net (a dangerous thing to do in croc country) – big relief after Russ thought it was a big croc – just inches away in the water!