My deckie for the weekend was a chap who fishes the Rocky Bounty and has successfully nailed some nice barra in Wuruma over the years. So with a bit of local experience I was feeling confident we could pick up some nice fish. Wuruma barra have a good reputation for being hard fighting silver fish.
We arrived and found a camp sit right on the water. The campgrounds are a couple of km’s North of the dam wall. Basic amenities are there (no showers), but a quick dip in the dam (water temp about 26.0 degrees) sorted that fundamental requirement out. There are picnic shelters scattered around the edge of the dam with fire pits on most of them. Fire wood use to be supplied but the local timber mill has shut down, so we took our own. The campgrounds are free and support a transient grey nomad population overnight. Of note we were one of only three powerboats on the dam all weekend.
The boat ramp is well sign posted and easy to use and with the camp set up on the water we left the boat in overnight. Once set up we were on the water looking around the dam. The water being the height that it is now covers a lot of timber. The deepest parts I found in the dam were 36.0m. We set up drifts (motor off) thanks to a nice breeze and found we could push of the timber as we came across it. I had one nice 600m drift, casting at the banks.
With the new LED lights fitted we headed out onto the dam at night. The moon was up and the wind was behaving itself. We headed for a nice shallow bay we had looked at earlier in the day. In we went drifting along again casting to all points of the compass. Poppers, frogs, vibes, classics, etc etc were put on the end of the line to no avail. The dimmer on the LED lights is a great little device, letting you push the lighting level right down.
After not finding the fish against the banks in the warmer water (up to 27.0 degrees at times), I started looking around in the deeper water. We found some bait with some nice fish arches sitting in around them in 15.0m of water. Out went and array of lures in an attempt to entice the fish. The trolling runs delivered nothing, so on went some oversized Vibes and we started lifting the lures through the depths and again we had nothing to show for our efforts.
In all we spent two full days and nights fishing the dam. I didn’t see any sign of a barra although one fishing group came in hand with some information stating the fish were in the shallows up in an arm near the dam wall. We went back out with this information but unfortunately again no results.
A disappointing fishing result, but getting time away from work and getting back on the water was very relaxing.
