It was the kind of session that usually ends with a few small grunters and an apology. The weather behaved, the Hinchinbrook Channel was glassy, and Buckers from the Fishing the North with Buckers channel had spent most of the morning trying to coax fish out of mangrove gutters with little to show for it. Then, on a small creek with the tide running out, a 45 cm mangrove jack walked out from under a tree, hit his lure twice and became his new personal best.
"I saw something cruising around and I was like, it's not barra, because they're not big enough," Buckers said early in the session, working live-scope sonar over a deeper hole. The shape on screen turned out to be a small giant trevally — a lively one that bored hard for the boat hull and snapped him into a quick wrestle on light gear. "Don't go under the boat," he muttered. "Keep going, mate." The trevally went back, the release a touch rough — "not a great release," he conceded — and the boat moved on.
The move was deliberate. Buckers ran the dinghy up another smaller creek with the tide dropping out, banking on the same simple piece of mangrove logic that has put fish in northern boats for decades. "As the tide drops, the fish will come up out of the mangroves," he said. Trevally were already showering bait behind him as he slid into the run-out.
What followed sat between two takes. The first was a thump under a leaning paperbark — "I saw him come out and bash it," he said, "he had a couple of goes" — and the second was the eat. The fish piled out from cover, took the lure cleanly and came up bumping the boat in a short, hard fight. Buckers got the pliers ready before he committed to a lift. "Let's get the pliers, because I don't want to get bitten," he said. "Dude, it's okay. Oh."
The measure tape did the rest. "That's a decent jack," he said as the fish flattened out. "What do we got? 45 cm. That's my PB. Yes. Awesome." He talked through the take a second time as he unhooked, with the camera angled across the fish and the early-evening sky behind. "Just came out from under that tree and absolutely belted it," he said. "Came back for another one and I just stopped it, let it die, and he just smashed it. So I'll let you go, buddy."
The simple takeaway from a quiet day on a famous channel was that the fish were where the textbook said they would be. Mangrove jacks dig into structure on a high tide and ambush prey down the gutters when the water drains, and a couple of casts tight to the timber on the run-out is often all it takes. The fish doesn't have to be huge to be a PB; a 45 cm mangrove jack from a creek mouth, on lures, fishing solo at sundown, is exactly the kind of trip-saver that keeps anglers coming back.
"The weather was decent, but the fishing wasn't so great," Buckers said at the end of the day. "But like they say, the best time to go fishing is when you can. So I made the most of it. Had a look around, saw some new spots. Got that awesome jack. I'm stoked with that."