CALLIDE Dam, located near the town of Biloela in Central Queensland, is the ugly duckling of Queensland’s stocked impoundments. The dam is the water source for the nearby coal fired power station that forms the backdrop for most of the fishing in the dam. The banks are uninteresting, and the scenery isn’t breathtaking. The dam is small, with the average boat taking about 10 minutes to go from the dam wall to the upper reaches.
I hadn’t been back to Callide Dam since around 2011. Prior to that time, I’d enjoyed quite a few trips to this dam, catching plenty of big barra up to 118cm with my son. We used to stay at Biloela and we only fished the place in daylight hours. At that time the best lures were Smith’s Sarunas and Squidgy Slick Rigs in white. I remember doing an article about 15 years ago in this magazine with plenty of shots of Michael, my son, holding metre long barras. He caught his first metre long barra in Callide as a little kid and I still have a photo of it on my wall. Back in this time the place was known to a few keen anglers but didn’t receive too much publicity and at the time there wasn’t the social media barrage that exists today. Disaster struck the dam in the winter of 2012. There was a prolonged cold snap and the water level was only around 3% at the time. The water temperature dropped to 12 degrees and every single barramundi in the dam went belly up, creating one of the biggest stinking piles of rotting fish ever seen in Queensland. Some of the dead fish were over 130cm in length.
Since that time, thanks to the vigorous stocking of fingerlings by local stocking groups, the barramundi population has been restored, although two flood events in subsequent years took some of the fish downstream over the wall. In 2018 reports started to filter through about some good catches in Callide Dam. I was still a bit scarred from a recent trip to Lake Awoonga where I fished for a day, got called back to work due to Covid and never got a bite. Awoonga is a great fishery but it isn’t easy and when they don’t bite, they won’t bite no matter what you try, and it is also quite crowded a lot of the time. We had a window of a few days in late November and headed off to Callide Dam with six anglers fishing from three tinnies. I’d talked the boys into changing venues from Awoonga, so the pressure was on to deliver some good fishing.
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When you go back to a place you haven’t been too for a decade there is a good chance that the lures that used to be effective will still work well in the same places you used to cast them a decade earlier. Well, that’s fine in theory. Six hours of casting by six anglers in three boats produced absolutely nothing. Someone caught a yellowbelly on the troll, but it was a very drab limp looking thing when compared to a beautiful big barramundi. Our new generation sounders with side imaging and all the other add-ons showed fish pretty much everywhere we went. This eliminated the perpetual question about whether we had found the fish or not, and on the side imaging you could clearly see by the shadow images the fish were barramundi. So how do you get barramundi with lock jaw to bite? We asked around and no anglers had caught a barra that day.
One of the big changes to Callide Dam since my last visit is that there is now a camping area with on-site cabins on the dam. The air-conditioned cabins were a great place to have a break in the middle of the day, and were very tidy, functional and well thought out for boat parking and recharging electric motors. Callide Dam Retreat is excellent value and made fishing the dam much easier. If you are planning a trip contact Lake Callide Retreat and Caravan Park. They have great cabins, camping options and a kiosk with a reasonable range of barra lures. As well as barramundi the dam holds red claw crays, yellowbelly and the odd saratoga in the upper reaches. When we were there it was extremely hot and the cabins with air conditioning were a very comfortable option. Shared between the six of us, they were great value and had excellent cooking facilities.
Despite the results the previous afternoon the boys were still extremely keen and opted for a 3.30am start. But we didn’t have a good plan at that stage, and a persistent pattern of mindless casting to points and snags just didn’t seem to work. The water temperature was good, the wind was light and from the north, the dam had a distinct thermocline and the moon was making. All these factors were positive. After the morning session I was a bit dejected, and the pile of lures I’d tried unsuccessfully that morning would have filled a two-gallon bucket. Once again, there were six anglers casting for over six hours with nothing to show for it. My mates, however, possess unflappable keenness and determination and were already hatching new plans. There were rumours around the camping area that someone had had a bite that morning casting near the “bubbler”, a giant aeration filter near the dam wall. Up until a few days earlier everyone, apparently, caught heaps of fish. The boys were scrolling through Dean Sylvester videos and cutting the fins off their Molix 140 plastic swim baits and tying new FG knots. While I was a bit jaded, the rest of the crew were frothing with new-found enthusiasm. But I needed a plan, and in a few minutes, I had one. I sent a message to Jason Ehrlich, who had recently caught a 125cm barra in Callide. It was more of a desperate plea for help. When Jason comes down to the coast, we usually swap information as to where the fish are biting, and when it comes to dams, he knows a lot more than most. His instructions were clear and simple. Troll 5-inch Zerek Live Mullets at 2.5 to 3 kilometres an hour using the electric and put the lures a long way back. Troll these about 100 metres wide of the buoy line near the dam wall. While I’d rather catch a barra casting than trolling, we now had a game plan to work on that afternoon. After a few hours sleep due to our 3.30am start, we headed back to the boat ramp with renewed confidence.
We mixed up some casting with trolling and concentrated our efforts towards the dam wall. There were, once again, a lot of fish marking mid water, probably holding over the old riverbed. Trolling a Live Mullet isn’t a very easy way to fish. The lure imparts no action at all through the line, it feels completely dead. At 2.5 kilometres per hour on the electric motor it was hard to work out the running depth of the lure, which at a guess was two to three metres. In my boat we trolled four Live Mullets from the rod holders, all positioned at least 60 metres behind the boat, as Jason had described. It was a very strange way to fish, but after 15 minutes I had a screaming reel and a big barra leaping about in the middle of the dam. After more than 24 hours of dough nuts that felt pretty good, and we soon had 95cm of fat Callide barramundi in the net. That fish quickly lead to more fish, and all three of our boats caught a few that afternoon on both the Zerek Live Mullets and also the Molix 140 plastics with trimmed fins and revamped hooks. We came in at around 9pm and in the cabins there was a flurry of lure modification, re-hooking and the garlic scented pens came out to paint and stink up our lures. According to Jason the morning sessions were often the best, and we were all keen to catch more big barramundi.
The next morning began in the usual pre-dawn blur with a flurry of activity around 3.30am. It looked very promising. We did some casting near the dam wall, had a few hits, and then reverted to trolling. Once again the Live Mullets got the bites, and we were starting to rack up a reasonable number of decent barra. I dropped a really good fish probably between 110 and 115cm that threw the hooks on a high jump. The average fish was around 95cm long and we only caught one fish under 90cm. They were all big solid fat fish and fought well. Between our group we caught four over a metre, the biggest was 103cm and was so fat it probably weighed 15 kilos.
My good mate Charles was having a blinder, assisted by his ever reliable crew James. They caught a lot of trophy fish. James is one of the tinniest anglers I know. He just does what he’s told, puts the lures on that Charles tells him to and then hooks up while most of us were head scratching. That morning produced around a dozen good fish for our group and without a doubt slow trolling soft plastic swim baits saved our trip. A lot of other anglers went fishless.
Once the sun was high and hot the bite shut down and we returned to the cabins. We caught fish quite consistently for the rest of the trip and I learn a lot. Barramundi fishing is forever changing, there is always a new lure or method to try. On this trip I was very thankful for the advice from Jason Ehrlich and it saved our trip. I’ve still got a long way to go when it comes to slow trolling these seemingly lifeless wiggling plastic fish! What I did learn was that slight modifications to the lure improved the hook-up rate. Adding an extra treble to the towing eyelet definitely improved the success, and having the bottom treble swinging on two or three split rings locked the hooks into the fish. Because these lures don’t give you the “feedback” or vibration that a normal hard bodied minnow does, it is important to check your lure after any hit or bump, as I found the lure would commonly tangle up on itself after a missed bite. It also required vigilance to keep the lure out of the weeds. I’ve since experimented and if you put the rod but in your ear you can sense if the lure is swimming or not by listening to the harmonics. This was something I came up with years ago on the Daly River, and while you can’t feel the swimming action of the lure through the rod, you can hear the faint vibration of a lure swimming in the correct way.
When trolling I like to use threadline outfits on quite long rods and fish quite a soft drag. This makes it easier for the fish to inhale the lure. The trebles I used were BKK Fangs and these high quality hooks are light, sharp and strong. Our lures were positioned about 60 to 80 metres behind the boat and our troll speed was 2.5 to 3 kilometres per hour. When it was windy it was hard to troll from the electric so I used the main motor, but I think it was less effective.
I really enjoyed our few days at Callide Dam and will return there soon. The fishing was entirely different to what I’d experienced a decade earlier, but the quality of the fish was excellent and catching barramundi is definitely one of my favourite forms of fishing. While inland impoundment like Awoonga Dam get most of the press these days, a trip to Callide Dam is a very good alternative. This ugly duckling of a dam hold some great fish.
