Australia's two marquee June barramundi competitions ran in the same week this year, and they could not have looked more different. One, on the Daly River south of Darwin, spent months digging out of a record flood just to open its gates. The other, on Cape York, threw one of its biggest parties yet.
Start on the Daly. The Barra Nationals has gathered anglers on the same 50-kilometre run of river for three decades — teams of three, a full week on the water, scored on the combined length of their five best fish each day, with every barra measured against a ruler and let go. In March, that stretch went under. The community of Daly River / Nauiyu copped its worst flood on record, homes drowned to the roofline, and the tournament's long-time home, Banyan Farm Tourist Park, vanished beneath the water.
Owner Kerri Draper has hosted the event since 1998 and admits she struggled to watch the footage. "It's pretty heartbreaking … it looked pretty disastrous," she said. The fix came from an unlikely crew of volunteers, most of them retirees, who shovelled the park back into shape. "You should've seen that crew on the shovels, they were fantastic," Draper said. "It's a lot of hard work, but once it kicks off it's a great week."
For the diehards, no flood was ever going to keep them away. Tracy Chelepy makes the three-day drive from Rockhampton every year with her team, the Bamboo Pandas. "We travel for three days [to get here] — you drive in and you're like 'let's bring it, it's the Barra Nationals'," she said.
The repairs pushed the comp back about six weeks, into cooler weather and lower water — and that changed the river. Darryl Smart, president of the Palmerston Game Fishing Club, which organises the event, said the reptiles had noticed. "There's a lot more big crocodiles out now with the cooler weather, which is good. If they could stay on the banks, that'd be even better," he said.
The dropping water level also turned the river into an obstacle course. Will Simpson, of the Metery Maniacs, found a submerged log the hard way. "We hit a log … we started sinking so we had to turn around and make like a cat and scram," he said. "Got the heart pumping a little bit … a bit too much maybe." Even so, the catch rate held: roughly 150 anglers in 50 teams — one hauling its boat down from Tasmania — boated 1,419 fish in the first three days, close to 830 metres of barramundi and almost 3.9 tonnes.
More than 2,000 kilometres north, Weipa needed no such rescue. The 21st Weipa Fishing Classic ran at Andoom Oval from 6 to 8 June, drawing better than 3,000 people a night and dangling more than $240,000 in prizes — boats, a buggy, a quad bike and stacks of tackle. Committee president Lisa Lui said the town carried it. "It all went really good, yeah. We didn't have as many tourists visit. But the locals showed up," she said.
Rough water didn't dent the result. Gav Roberts took out the senior title and Fyn Gorman claimed the junior crown for the second straight year, while Murray Mountjoy led the points with 1,476 to win a Quintrex 570 Renegade ahead of Archer Plate (1,380) and Bob Hall (1,053). Lui kept coming back to the youngest competitors. "I love watching the kids come through. They were so excited," she said — "some of the fish they land are as big as they are." She had similar praise for the local backers: "The Weipa community is always here for us with the sponsorships. They're always there willing to lend a hand."
Two comps, two very different roads to the weigh-in. The common thread: in a country where barramundi is close to a religion, neither floods nor crocodiles could keep the boats off the water.