Destinations: Melville Island, NT
The inaugural Melville Challenge has resulted in students at a unique school on remote Melville Island benefiting from the generosity of the Australian tackle industry. DAVID GREEN reports.
MELVILLE Island Lodge, located on the shores of Snake Bay on the northern coastline of Melville Island, is probably the best-run resort of its kind in tropical Australia. The Melville Island Challenge was the brainchild of Fisho’s Jim Harnwell and John Newbery together with Mike Baxter, the owner of the lodge. The idea was to pitch the skills of the various writers working for this magazine against each other in a cutthroat competition across a whole range of species using tackle and lures provided by Shimano, Halco, Rapala, Plano, Gamakatsu and Atomic while fishing from the guided boats of the lodge in the beautiful waters off Melville Island. In addition to this, the tackle at the end of the trip was to be donated to the Tiwi College after the team spent time teaching students a few casting skills and a bit about lures and rigging.
After a quick 30-minute flight from Darwin we settled into the lodge. After a couple of months in a tent (see my column on page 56), this was definitely a luxury for me, although the smelly bunch of clothes I brought back in a rush to the airport from the Daly River were very pungent reminders that now I was in 5 star accommodation (apologies to Tarn!). Once we settled back to a magnificent sunset on the verandah of the lodge, Captain Harnwell established the rules of the competition. Biggest fish, most fish, longest of species etc seemed to be the order of the comp, although there did seem to be some kind of “editor’s privilege” created along the way.
The weather on the first morning was calm. However, a strong south-easterly was expected the following day so we all headed to the offshore grounds chasing pelagics. In head guide Warren “Wazza” Smith’s boat were Jamie Crawford, Jim and John. I was fishing with Sami Omari and Pete Zeroni with Dan Finch as our guide. We headed wide, about 10km off the island and a fair way west. A quick troll produced a couple of small Spaniards, then a few bigger ones and then the surrounding water became a seething mass of about 50,000 Spaniards. I’ve caught lots and lots of mackerel over the years but these ones were the least discriminatory I’ve fished for. I caught four on a plain jig head, two on a piece of Glad Wrap, one on a trolled Twix chocolate bar (not very durable though, next time I’ll try a Cherry Ripe) and Sami caught one on a trolled soft drink can. Peter Zeroni was glued to the camera throughout. Pete is so keen on taking photos of jumping fish he’s been known to hook a barra, drop the rod and pick up his camera!
We caught about 30 mackerel, and a lot of these fish sky-rocketed the lures high into the air on strike. I’ve been in crazy pelagic situations before where the fish are suicidal and in huge numbers, and one of the best ways to watch the carnage is to take the hooks off the lures. We set Sami on the job of removing the hooks and rings from a 150 Scorpion. He also took the bib out for good measure. (Possibly to be featured in an upcoming “how to” article.) Sami seems pretty handy at reducing lures to bare bones, and the bibless and hookless Scorpion was cast into the mackerel hordes. It is obviously very frustrating to a big Spanish mackerel when the small juicy fish it just annihilated is rock hard and swims away, and the second attack is full of venom, with the mackerel flying up to 10m in the air with the hookless lure flying around somewhere near it. If you look closely at the pic below you can see the mackerel flying high up in the air with a “what the hell is going on here” expression on its face. Pete Zeroni’s camera was in overdrive, and as everyone was keen to get behind the lens rather than cast we started trolling a pair of hookless lures. I’m not sure what Dan thought of all this, but hookless lures makes for a bloody easy day for a guide, so for several hours we trolled hookless lures while hundreds and hundreds of Spaniards leapt way up into the sky. Some of those Spaniards were getting serious airtime. I’ve got one as my screen saver and I reckon he’s close to 30 feet out of the water. Pete was in some kind of jumping fish heaven, especially when we started trolling. I’ve never seen a keener photographer. After this chaos we headed back to meet the other boys, and they’d had similar success on Spaniards, although they left the hooks on. They also caught some big golden snapper and black jew on plastics, with Jamie catching a nice 14 kilo jewie and John a seven kilo goldie. I don’t think they believed us when we told them we took the hooks off to give them a head start!
Jim drew the crews for the next day from the hat, and we made plans for our next attack. Twenty knots plus of cold south-easterly arrived that evening, and stayed with us for the next few days. Our boat headed for the Jessie River. I’d heard a lot about the famous rock bar near the mouth of the Jessie, but from a barra perspective the sudden cold snap wasn’t ideal. We trolled the rock bar for a few small cod, before anchoring up and jigging it with soft plastics. Jim hooked a big fish straight away that tore off heaps of string and after about 10 minutes bent the hook, but he was soon back in action with a similar fish taking heaps of line. This time he patiently wore it down and a very nice golden coloured black jew of 13.5 kilos hit the net. This was marginally smaller than Jamie’s fish of the previous day, which prompted Jim to start a new category in the Challenge of “biggest estuary jew”. I caught a smaller one shortly after then the tide began running hard and we moved up river to chase barra and jacks.
The barra fishing that day was a bit slow due to the unseasonally cold conditions, but I soon found the four-inch Guzzler Shads in the sponsored tackle box worked well when slow rolled along the bottom. This produced about 10 fish in total for the session up to about 70cm in length. I was pretty impressed with the Guzzlers and I’ve added a few packs to the top draw of my barra plastics box since this trip. They are an excellent lure, with great tail action at almost zero speed, just the trick for shut-down barra. Back at the lodge the fierce rivalry between the contestants was starting to hot up and we had a protest when Sami reckoned Jamie’s jew was the biggest so far and that having an “estuary black jew” section was complete rubbish. Jim swiftly overruled this and deducted points from Sami for insubordination.
After two days the total species count was quite high, with an impressive list of Spanish mackerel, black jew, golden snapper, barramundi, mangrove jack, queenfish, longtail tuna, giant trevally, barracuda, estuary cod, coral trout and groper. Clearly, Melville Island is a great place to visit if you want a lot more than barramundi.
It’s hard to write anything about Melville Island without including Goose Creek. This magic waterway can only be accessed by guests of Melville Island Lodge, and has a rightly earned reputation as one of the most pristine fishing destinations in the Top End. Goose Creek holds a vibrant population of big saratoga, and the lilies and clean run off of the upper reaches are very special. There are 63kms of navigable waterway in Goose Creek, which gives you an idea about of the size of Melville Island (after Tasmania, Melville is the biggest island in Australia) and how how big this particular waterway is. As well as saratoga, Goose Creek is probably the most consistent barra river on the island, with plenty of great fish turning up from the mouth in the salt where they cruise the rocks and sandy channels, up to the tannin water where golden swampy barras suck in lures in the shade of pandanus and paperbark. I really enjoyed fishing Goose Creek. Sami and Jamie had little barra experience but were soon pretty tuned in to a hot little barra bite and it was great to see the seeds sewn of what will obviously become a long-term fishing addiction for them. We caught 47 barra in Goose Creek up to Jamie’s PB of 78cm, with a couple of bigger fish lost.
We all caught some great saratoga on a wide range of lures in what can only be described as a beautiful place. Goose Creek is the only creek on the island where saratoga are regularly caught, and this isolated population of fish seems to be thriving, particularly after a big wet season. Goose Creek has long been promoted as a vintage fishery, and having finally fished the place it I can assert that it certainly lives up to its reputation. The journey up this creek is a boat ride that’s hard to forget, as the country undergoes marked transitions from salt marsh to paperbark swamp to lilies and tannin water. It’s full of impressive crocs and surrounded by feeding buffalo.
By this stage I was getting quite a taste for Melville Island and its fantastically diverse fishery. The Lodge is an outstanding set up; certainly the most professionally run remote resort I’ve ever visited. All the boats are great, the guides are extremely helpful and the tackle provided is good quality.
On our final day we visited the Tiwi College at nearby Pickertaramoor and were invited to meet the students of this innovative school. Jim spoke to the assembled group about the potential of careers related to recreational fishing, and he presented the rods, reels and terminal tackle to the school to be used as part of their teaching program. We then had a bit of time with the students teaching casting and showing them the lures. It never ceases to amaze me how brilliant the hand/eye co-ordination of most Aboriginal kids is. They were naturals. The Tiwi College offers one of the most innovative remote educational programs in the NT, including an emphasis on literacy through sport. This time spent in the college was very refreshing for me personally, as it was very positive. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in remote Aboriginal communities on the mainland where such stories of hope can be hard to find.
The inaugural Melville Island Challenge was a great success. Mike Baxter and his staff at the Lodge work in a co-operative arrangement with the Tiwi community, and it was great to see the potential opportunities for kids growing up on the island that come from reinvestment of the money from such joint agreements. On behalf of the Fishing World crew, I’d like to thank Mike for inviting us to spend time at the Lodge, and experience the great diversity of fishing this luxury resort has to offer the visiting angler.
Editor’s Note: For details of the fishing opportunities at Melville Island, check out melvillelodge.com. See more reports and a gallery of Jamie Crawford’s Melville images at fishingworld.com.au.
