Happy Australia Day everyone! The My Catch Australia Team trekked it up to the Bli Bli Barra Park on the Sunshine Coast on Sunday. We arrived there at 9.30am and was let in a little early by the very helpful staff onsite. The staff onsite were quick to brief us on the best tactics to use to catch their famous Barramundi.

As we were soon to find out these fish are not your ordinary Barra and the day was a lot more challenging than originally thought. The team started off by casting out a variety of hard and soft plastic lures. We had a few bumps and hits but strangely enough nothing seemed to hook up.

We then moved onto using the pellets that were recommended by the staff when we first arrived. We baited up our size 6 hooks, burley’d up and cast out our lines into the floating pellets.

We found these fish were particularly smart at spotting your hook and line attached to the pellet. Even when you had embedded your hook into the pellet to disguise it fairly well. These fish will test both your gear and your patience. It was extremely painful watching a fish come up inspect your pellet for 5 seconds, see the hook and then move onto the pellet right next to it and strike it. The race was on to find a way to trick these cunning fish.

The team tried a bunch of different hook sizes, colours and shapes. Bronze coloured hooks seemed to work the best as they blended in with the colour of the pellets. We also tried silver and red hooks with no success. The team used a range of line weights, at one point we were tempted to try 3lb leader as we were sure the fish could see our 6, 8 and 10lb.

Each My Catch Australia Team member was using a different Maximus Rod supplied to us from Rodzilla Adventure Tackle. Below is a list of gear each person was using.

We all had a fantastic day on the water with everyone ending up catching a fish. We tried pretty much everything to try and trick these cunning fish into striking our floating pellets. Jason ended up catching the biggest of the day at 78cm, followed by Paul with a 76cm fish that took him on 15 minute run around the pond. Michael and Marty followed up with a number of smaller 30 – 40cm fish.