I posted this in another spot but it should probably go here.

I spent a day on the Daintree River in FNQ last week with Damon from Sublime Sportfishing. He's a great bloke a good operator too. He has an awesome 5.5m Galeforce centre console for the river and inshore, and a 40' Blackwatch for the reef and marlin fishing.

The Daintree is a hard river to fish, and it's generally quite shallow with a lot of underwater obstacles so trolling isn't worth it. The barra tend to sit in shallow beds of ribbon weed, except near the mouth where they live around the mangroves. We fished soft plastics rigged weedless. The angler's job is to land the placcie in a dinner-plate sized area right where the river meets the bank and retrieve really slowly and let the lure do the work. Too far from the bank and you get nothing so we cast into the scrub plenty of times! Retrieve too slow and you hit the weed and the fish and get nothing. Too fast and it goes over their heads and you get nothing. The aim is to be about 100mm above the weed bed which we ended up getting a feel for. At the start of the day my daughter couldn't cast within 5m of the bank and by the end, could nail it within inches. You certainly improve your casting quickly! The clear winner on the day was a paddle-tail placcie in chartreuse and blue.

The fish weren't biting well but we managed to land 4 small barra and 2 jacks. We lost a few that threw the hook jumping, and had quite a few hits that didn't hook up but that's fishing. We saw a bloody big croc of about 4.5m and one about 3m. All in all it was a great day out.

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