Lee Brake reveals to us how small, out of the way creeks can be hotspots of piscatorial activity and gives us his game plan for one of his favourite little systems

Pinpoint casting is imperative when working snags around a creek mouth. Fish will hold right in the back corners of snags.

Let’s face it, unless you spend the money to travel to a remote location or are lucky enough to stumble upon a hot bite already underway, barra can be a cantankerous bunch, especially in and around most urban areas. With boat traffic and fishing pressure growing by the year, these silver assassins are wising up. Now, that’s not to say they aren’t there. They are, and most baby boomers will tell you that there are actually a lot more barra around than there were in the days before bag limits and closed seasons. You just have to find them and get them to bite. With that in mind, sit back in your comfiest chair with a cuppa and let me share with you a few tricks that have helped me out when fishing for barra closer to home.
It all starts at home with the planning stage. When I’m plotting a day’s barra fishing, I like to think outside the box. I’ve also worked from home for a while now and I grew up in the country, so my tolerance for crowds is pretty closely matched to my tolerance for reality TV and any form of music where the drummer has been replaced by a dude with his hat on backwards who pushes buttons. For that reason, I always ask myself where the least amount of people will be. Usually, the answer involves a little creek system that is tricky to access or reach. ‘Do the miles and get the smiles’ is the old saying and around urban areas it rings very true. Most anglers just want an easy day on the water. They want a boat ramp they can access at all tides; they want a nice deep creek that is easily accessed and navigated; and they don’t want to be travelling for too long.

Without giving too much away, the creeks I fish usually have to be accessed by scooting along a few miles of coastline; they are usually shallow at the mouth and on low tides gaining entry becomes sketchy at best; they are all small creeks with just a few miles from the mouth to the point of shallow, densely foliaged impassability; and they all have a limited number of key fish-holding geographical points.
The obvious advantage of such systems is that most anglers look at them as not worth the effort to reach. After all, why travel long distances and face the difficulties of shallow water entry when your rewards are only a few likely-looking spots in a very small creek?
I find the rewards are exactly that – fewer likely-looking spots for the fish to be on! If you can be the first angler to arrive at such a creek, then you can quickly deduct where the bait will congregate, where the best ambush points are, and where the fish will go at certain times of the tide. In big systems the fish can go to any number of spots, and picking the right spot at the right time is riskier than being a little person entertainer at St Kilda Football Clubs’ Mad Monday celebration! In small creeks it’s much easier. This gives you a lot of self-confidence as an angler and takes a lot of the guesswork out of finding the fish.
For example, one creek I work regularly has a very narrow mouth with several drains running into the small sandy channel that winds into the creek and then drops off to a cut-away bank with some fallen timber. Up close to this bank is rarely more than 1.5 metres deep at low tide and as you move further out into the centre of the estuary it shallows off further before drying out. Past this shallow area and cut-away bank the creek opens up slightly and then drops off suddenly into a four metre hole, which then narrows once more before petering out along a series of progressively shallower rock bars. This means that from those features I can easily formulate a game plan.
Walking the dog to find them
Often, in an effort to be first on the scene, I’ll arrive at my chosen mini-system about half tide out. Normally the mud and sand will just be starting to show and there will be an exodus of bait and muddy water from the drains. This is the time to take the dog for a walk. ‘Huh?’ I hear you say. ‘How did we get from fishing to perambulating K9’s?’
You’d better let me explain…
I first got introduced to ‘walking the dog’ in the Top End while fishing with the crew of Eclipse Charters and ex-fishing guide and friend, Dave ‘Lumpy’ Milson. Lumpy’s favourite lure is a Jonesy’s Mi Dog – a small, cigar-shaped top-walker about the size of a cocktail sausage. It ‘clip-clops’ across the surface in a walk-the-dog fashion. This lure, and others like it (Reidy’s J-Walkers and Rapala Skitter Walks being the top two), became the lures to use to find out if barra were feeding in an area.
To explain further, when feeding around drains, barra are at their most mobile. They’ll cruise around, often using submerged roots or snags or simple dirty water as cover, and then they’ll zero in on bait leaving the drains and coming off the flats. They are alerted to this by their lateral line (which detects vibrations) and sense of hearing. Nothing makes a more appealing noise and vibration combo than the seductive ‘clip clop clip clop’ of a small walk-the-dog lure. Usually I’ll anchor well off a drain and flog it for at least twenty minutes before moving on to the next one. If you haven’t raised a barra (or at least seen a swirl or flash under the lure) within the first ten minutes, try picking up a light spin stick and flicking a little weighted plastic into the drain. I do this for two reasons: it is a great way to tempt a flathead and sometimes also the barra will be feeding on small jelly prawns or micro bait rather than the usual poddy and pop-eye mullet. Remember this fact, as we’ll come back to it later. If neither approach works, then move to the next drain.
When picking drains to work, the more water pushing out, the better. Pick a drain that has a billowing mushroom head of dirty water at its mouth if you can.
Peppering the snags
Casting lures at mangroves is a well-covered topic, so I won’t bore you. However, the very last of the run out tide (or once you’ve exhausted the drains) is the time to head for the snags. The flow past the structure will have slowed somewhat and most of the bait will have retreated from the flats and mangrove canopy as the water drains. This means that any fallen timber hanging from the bank becomes the only shelter available and the bait will head for it. That cut-away bank I mentioned earlier is my next stop. I know that any bait and fish that are opting to stay in the creek over low water will likely hold up there and if I can accurately cast in a way that puts my lure right into the snag where the predators are waiting, I should do alright. I will usually cast a variety of weedless rigged plastics and small, snag-resistant floating hardbodies. Because of the depth of this creek, it’s likely that for the next two hours (until the tide starts running back in) my catch will mostly consist of small barra, the odd bream and maybe some cod. If the bank was deeper then you could expect a larger class of fish and the odd mangrove jack.
On a related note, the first decent structure in enough water to hold fish inside the mouth of a creek is the place to be for the very last of the run-out! It doesn’t matter if it’s rocks, timber or something else.
Here they come!
Remember that four metre hole? Yep, that’s where we want to be for that first of the run-in tide. If you can find a nice hole that is markedly deeper than the surrounding estuary then that will be the first stop for bait and predators entering the system on the making tide. They will hold and feed in this hole until the water is high enough for the bait to re-enter the mangrove canopy and the safety of the submerged root mass. The secret here is to find the edge where the hole drops off. Barra and other predators will sit on this edge and feed on the influx of bait as it’s washed into the hole by the incoming current. Try casting sinking offerings past the drop-off and then work them back, allowing them to swim/sink down the edge. Lures with a seductive action on the drop are ideal for this. Think Thready Busters, Transams, Berkley Gulp Crazy Legs Jerkshads, Zman SwimmerZ and Atomic Prongs. You’ll want enough weight so that you can stay in contact with your lure throughout the retrieve. Go too light and you won’t be able to feel when you’ve dropped into the hole and when to freespool.
Now, remember earlier I mentioned using small, weighted plastics to see if the barra were feeding on micro baits and jelly prawns? Here’s where that comes into play again. Observe your environment and your sounder screen. If you see plenty of big bait shows and schools of mullet rushing past, then stick with the larger soft vibes and 4-6’ plastics; but if you notice more light clutter on the sounder and see showering jelly prawns around the edges of the hole, then it’s time to break the light gear back out.

The author with a nice just-legal barra taken around the front of one of his favourite little creeks on baitcaster tackle. The rod pictured is an Abu Vanguard (6’) which has the backbone for pulling fish from snags and drains and also a tip sensitive enough to work soft vibes and medium sized plastics in holes.

Just the other day I saw how effective going to tiny lures on light tackle can be for barra. The water temperature was a mere 19 degrees and, to be honest, we were actually chasing grunter in the aforementioned four metre hole. I was also getting out-fished by my partner in crime Sam. He was using a two inch Atomic Prong soft plastic prawn, while I was using a three inch jerkshad. Not only did he land a swag of grunter and fingermark on the little Prong, but after seeing some jelly prawns shower near the drop-off, he flicked his little 2-5 kg, 1000 Stradic and 5 lb braid combo at the area, paused, mention he’d had a strike and then watched as a 60 cm-plus barra leapt from the water! He not only landed this fish, but then two casts later, looked at the sounder, spotted a show of bait, dropped the peanut-sized lure over beside the boat and hooked-up to and landed a bigger fish around the 70cm mark! So there’s the next big tip you should take from this article – if the fish are playing hard-to-get, don’t just find a smaller creek, use a smaller lure!
Once the water is heading back into the mangroves, it’s usually time to head for home, but if you still have some energy in the tank, then by pushing up the creek to any rock bars, like the ones in this creek, you can find a small bite window as the tide rises over them. Plastics and vibes are again the weapons of choice here, especially when worked around the upstream side of the rocks (there is usually a slight drop-off there). It can also pay to go for weighted, weedless offerings like TT Snakehead jigheads.
Weapons of choice
The best thing about working a small creek is that you don’t need lots of gear. Just a light spin stick and a medium baitcaster combo will get the job done. I use a 2-4 kg, 7’ custom flick stick made by LJ Customs in Darwin with a Shimano Stadic 1000 and 5 lb braid as my light combo, and a 4-6 kg graphite baitcaster around 6’ with a 100 size reel and 20 lb or 30 lb braid and 60 lb leader. A medium weight spin stick (6’8’ long and with a 4000 reel) would be fine too, especially for working larger vibes and plastics; however, I like the accuracy of the baitcaster for snag flicking over the last of the run-out.

Go small!
Obviously every small creek will be different and you probably won’t have the same set of circumstances as I have mentioned above, but you should have a least some of them and now have an idea of how and when to take advantage. Check out Google Earth and make a note of any small creeks up the coast from you that you’ve never visited. Check your tides for a low around the middle of the day and, weather permitting, go for a run. Often the first trip is just for exploratory purposes, but once you know the lay of the creek you can come back with a game plan like the one I have illustrated for you above.
Fish hard and stay safe.
Lee Brake has been fishing the waters of north Queensland since he could walk and catching whiting and bream in the creek with his father and grandfather, he can now be found almost anywhere on the blue. His favourite styles would be either deep-water jigging or snag flicking for barramundi.