Rocks: the structure most anglers never really work out

There are a few famous rocks up here. Shoal Bay has one, the Daly has several, the South Alligator too. But a rock does not have to be famous to hold barra. The entire Top End coastline is littered with rock bars, rocky points, isolated outcrops and rubble patches, and nearly all of them are worth something at some stage of the year.

If you fish barra at all, particularly in the harbours, you will end up fishing rocks most trips. Getting it right is not easy at first. With some planning, the right tides and a bit of luck from the weather, it becomes a genuine feather in your cap.

Isolated rocks in open water

These are the hardest, because they need two things to line up at once: smooth calm conditions and the right tide height. Those two do not coincide often.

Broadly, isolated rocks in open water fish at the very top of the tide when it is glassy, or at the very bottom when there are obvious muddy colour changes and bait pushed up around them.

One of the best sessions I have been part of came off an isolated rock five hundred metres off the edge of the estuary — a big barra, a big golden snapper and another good fish in short order, on an oily flat day at the top of a neap. It was borderline too choppy even then, and the next day it would not have happened, because the high tide pushes back three quarters of an hour and lands in the windy part of the day.

That is the nature of them. The trick is simply to keep them in your plan. A few times a year everything lines up, and when it does the results are out of proportion to the effort.

Rock bars in the big rivers

In a system like the Daly or the South Alligator, timing the tide is everything, and the same rock bar wants a completely different tide depending on the season.

Through the run-off, you want the big spring tides. Water rushes up over the bar, swirls, and groups the bait up as it backs the flood water off and slows everything down. Barra that have been sitting with their nose into the current get their turn, and fish moving up with the tide use the bar to pin bait against. Add an overhanging tree throwing an eddy off the side of it and you can have a very hot half hour.

Come the back end of the season, once the flood water has receded, the same bar wants neap tides and clean water. Two reasons. The bait aggregates there, and the rocks hold warmth — they sit exposed to the sun on the low and hold more heat than mud or timber ever will. That is also when the bar is worth trolling.

Same structure, opposite tides, six weeks apart. If a rock bar has never produced for you, the likeliest explanation is that you have been fishing it on tides that suit somewhere else.

Which side to fish

For a submerged bar across a creek mouth, sit up-current and work back. The better fish sit on the up-current pressure point, and if you are on the down-current side trying to hold a bait on the bottom it will just wash down and hang up in everything.

With lures, sitting off to the side and throwing up-current, working them back over the bar, beats trying to throw down-current and drag them back against the flow.

There is one more thing worth thinking about, which is which way the fish is pointing. A lure that comes past a barra's nose is far more likely to get bitten than one that comes past its tail.

For fish sitting down tight in rock in current, a dropper rig is worth knowing. Run the lure — usually a big soft plastic — above a sinker, with the line to the sinker at a lower breaking strain than the rest. The weight gets you down without killing the lure's action, and if the sinker wedges you break it off, keep the lure, tie on another dropper and carry on. It is the same principle as drop-shotting for bass in the States, and it works for exactly the same reason: those fish are sitting in a hole waiting, they are not coming up for you, so you have to get in front of them.

Trolling over rock without donating your lures

The lures that work over rock bars are the crash divers — long-bibbed, deep-diving and very buoyant. The bib takes the hit and the lure tips over, then floats or hovers back up over the obstacle.

The technique that makes it work is counter-intuitive. Keep the rod tip up, almost straight up. When the lure hits rock and comes up tight, throw the rod tip forward and give it slack. That slack lets it tip over, ride up, and start swimming again.

The instinct, of course, is to jag into it, because it feels exactly like a bite. Teaching four people at once to drop their rod tips instead of striking is one of the harder parts of the job.

A useful tweak: downsize the front treble, or replace it with a single. The bib already shields the front of the lure, and taking weight out of the nose means it tips over and floats up more readily. There is a bonus in it too — a single of equivalent size has a much bigger gape and one solid barb, so while it hooks up less often, fish stay on it far better than on a treble.

The other rule is to match the lure to the depth. A five-metre crash diver over two metres of rock will spend its life hanging up. Pick the tool for the water.

Foreshore rocks and rock walls

Around town — the rock walls, the foreshore ledges, the beaches with rocky points running onto them — high tide and clean water is the pattern. There is not a lot else worth fishing on a high tide in the harbour, so they earn their place.

These fish are edgy. They are aware of their surroundings and they know when something has changed. Land-based often out-fishes a boat in exactly those spots, for that reason.

Tackle makes a real difference here. Years ago I could not reach a particular rock off the beach with fifty pound braid and a six-foot glass rod. With a seven-and-a-half-foot rod and fifteen or twenty pound braid you throw twice as far and present far better. Finesse tackle around rocks is not fussiness, it is range.

Lures, and the value of being different

I have never found a standout rock lure, and that is worth saying plainly. Hard bodies, plastics, and the occasional oddity have all worked.

Which points at something more useful. In water that gets fished hard, the biggest edge in lure selection is often just throwing something the fish have not seen. Every barra in a popular spot has watched the same handful of lures go past all season. If you know they are there, the conditions are right and they are not biting, five casts with something strange is a better move than another twenty with the usual.

Prospecting like that is much easier if you can change quickly — a good clip saves retying leaders every few casts, and once something gets a knock you can take the clip off and tie a proper loop knot.

The broader point is that we all catch our fish on whatever is tied on the end of the line. Letting go of a favourite lure is one of the more useful things you can do for your fishing, even when it costs you on the day.

Where the catchable fish actually are

On a well-known rock you will see fish on the sounder almost any day, and most of them are uncatchable. The ones sitting hard on the bottom, or tucked into the toe of the rock, are not active.

The ones that are up — a metre off the bottom, a metre or two off the rock — are the targets. You may not see them cleanly on structure scan because of the angle, but you will see their shadow. A fish casting a decent shadow is up and about, and that is the one worth casting at.

So do not worry about bumping the rock. Worry about getting the lure to the depth the active fish are holding at.

On pressured rocks

The famous spots are hard now, and weekends are the worst of it — pressured fish, fifteen boats, sounders pinging all morning.

The people who do well there get out at sparrows, lock into their water before the low, and fish it before anyone arrives. By the time the rest are launching, they are heading home. There is no clever trick beyond being early.