Snags: which timber holds fish, and where in it they sit

Snaggy country is always worth a lure, a fly or a live bait — but it earns its reputation when it turns up alongside something else. A weed bed. A drop-off. A deep hole. A rock bar.

That overlap is the real prize, and it is worth thinking of it as its own kind of structure: two or more features intersecting, so the spot offers shelter, an ambush point, a current break and a holding place all at once. Bait likes it for one set of reasons and barra like it for another.

Once you start looking at it that way, a lot of things fall into place. There are individual trees in Bynoe and Darwin Harbour that always seem to have fish around them — nothing special about the tree, except that it sticks out from everything else nearby. My hunch is they work as waypoints. The fish drift down a bank, stop at that tree, move on to the next one, then to a snag, then to a drop-off on the low. Those spots repeat, and they are worth keeping in the back of your mind.

The flip side is just as useful: a snag out in the middle of a river in full current is far less likely to hold a barra than one sitting in a back eddy where there is bait and somewhere easy to rest. Snags are not snags, any more than oils are oils.

Where in the snag they sit

If you take one thing from this, take this.

Big trees generally fall with the stump facing up-current, because the tree gets washed downstream. So the boughs and branches sit downstream of the root ball. The bigger fish sit on the stump — up on that pressure point where the water pushes over it, nose tucked behind a root or under a divot, taking anything worth the effort as it washes past. The smaller fish are further back, down in the branches.

That means fishing the stump first, from as far out as you can still cast accurately, before you go anywhere near the rest of it. Clean that out, then work down the sides.

It also means the biggest fish are often not in the snag at all. A big barra is the alpha in that stretch of water — the only things it worries about are crocs and sharks, and neither is an immediate problem most of the time. So it sits wherever it likes, and quite often that is out in a depression five metres off the timber where an old root hole used to be. You see the same thing in the harbours as the tide runs off the top: big fish just floating out, fifteen metres off the bank, wings out, comfortable.

Start wide, cover it, move in five metres, cover it again. It takes discipline and it is worth it.

Rattling the cage

This is one of my favourite ways to fish, and it comes into its own on low-tide snags in creeks that hold a bit of water when everything around them has drained — the lock-in scenario.

The idea is simple: get in there with a noisy, aggressive lure and force a reaction. Short backhand casts, a short rod, and a hard downward twitch. Crack, crack, pause. Crack, crack, pause. Once the lure is within a couple of metres of the boat, wind it in fast and throw it straight back in.

At the bottom of the tide those fish have often gone off the chew, and the noise is what brings them undone. It works best through the run-off and build-up, when they are feeding harder anyway.

One cast per stump is not enough. A single stump might need four or five shots from different angles and distances before you have genuinely covered it — the first one may well have gone over the fish's head, or past its tail, or landed too far in front of its nose. Work down the creek on the drift, standing up the front, hitting every bit of timber properly as you go.

The hook-ups are savage, because the bite is a reaction rather than a decision.

In the rivers, where there is real flow

Somewhere like the Daly, where there is current most of the time, methodical snag work is harder and the approach changes.

Sit the boat up-current of the snag rather than side-on, stand down the back, and throw down-current. Crack, crack, pause — let the lure hover up over the branches — crack, crack, pause. Plastics get the same treatment: let them flutter down slowly, nose into the current, and work them across the fallen tree without hurrying.

Before you do any of that, though, sit off to the side and throw at the stump from a distance. Same reason as always: that is where the better fish are, and you want them before the boat gets close.

Don't burn the spot

This one cost me a session before I worked it out.

We found a red-hot bite one afternoon — fifteen fish in an hour as they came in on the tide, parking behind a tree at a creek mouth. So the next day I went an hour earlier, thinking I would get more of it. I got very little.

If you are sitting there rattling cages and banging around the boat before the fish arrive, they will simply carry on to the next spot. You are in their safe place, the one they stop at on the way through, and you have made it unwelcoming before they even got there.

Tides creep about three quarters of an hour a day, so shift with them — but shift by that, not by an hour of wishful thinking. You are better off turning up to find them already biting and wishing you had come sooner, than arriving early and spooking a spot that then never fires.

Sounding them first

If you are covering unfamiliar country, side-scan is worth using — thrown out wide, stealthily, so you are reading the snag well before you are on top of it. Even a vague inkling of something in there justifies a few casts.

A snag that holds fish will usually hold fish again, though I would not say always. Tide, current, water clarity and where the bait is all get a vote. There are snag piles I go to and simply fish without sounding at all, because everything around them is right — a decent bend, a creek behind, an eddy swirling through. Those ones I stop a hundred metres back and sneak up on the electric.

What to throw

For rattling, a shallow hard body with a tight action and a loud rattle is hard to beat, which is why the barra classic gets used so much. Deeper divers in the three-metre class do the job too.

With plastics, fish an exposed hook wherever it is practical — your hook-up rate is better. In current, or in short-cast low-tide work, you can usually get away with it. In heavy timber, go weedless.

Wedge tails are excellent weedless: a five inch for general work, a seven inch when you are specifically after a bigger fish, rigged on a worm hook with a ball sinker in the loop knot. Very soft plastics tend not to hold up in heavy timber — the firmer, oil-based baits like the big jerk shads sit better on a big worm hook.

Worth checking your hooks, too. If the eye sits level with the hook point, the point tucks in snug against the plastic and stays genuinely weedless. Hooks with the eye a millimetre or two higher leave that point standing proud, and you will feel the difference in how often you hang up.

Soft hands

The weedless retrieve is where most people go wrong. It is small movements — a shake of the rod tip, barely moving it. Sink it in there and work it up slowly. You need to feel the line coming up over each stick so you do not mistake it for a bite and drive the hooks into a branch.

A long extra-fast rod earns its money here. Extra-fast means it bends at the tip only, so with seven and a half or eight feet of leverage the smallest movement drives the hook home and gets the fish coming your way in that critical first metre. Most rods off the shelf are a bit bendy through the middle, which costs you exactly when you cannot afford it.

Both of the biggest barra I have been involved with came off short casts into low-tide timber, well after the other boats had left the area. That is not a coincidence.