The Beauty and Bounty of Bowen – By Luke Galea
Those of you who have read any of my previous articles from this publication will know that I get to travel rather frequently for work and that those locations I travel to, just so happen to be beautiful, quite often remote and most importantly, fish rich. I’m not going to lie, this is an amazing part of my job and is not something I take for granted.
I’ve penned more than a few stories now on my work travels to Weipa where I have had the pleasure of targeting and catching sailfish (a bucket-list fish for me) and a few occasions fishing with fellow F&B scribe, Dave Donald. It’s quite the perk having to travel to places like that for “work”. Of course, I say “work” in inverted comma’s as we all know that if you truly love your job and the work you do, then you never really work a day in your life. Yes, I am one of those lucky ones.
There is another pretty cool location I get to travel to for work as well. One of which I feel I have not mentioned before but it’s the beautiful little town of Bowen. Bowen is a bit of a fishing mecca in its own right to be honest and some of their lesser-known beaches (Horseshoe Bay, Grays Bay, Murrays Bay etc) would rival the beauty of many more well-known destinations around this nation.
What an absolutely amazing sight to behold…an adult flatback turtle returns to the water after nesting. So bloody cool.
My most recent trip to Bowen was a great one. The work we were conducting on this occasion required us to start mid-afternoon and finish up late at night. Of course, with those sort of hours, a bit of a sleep in was on the cards BUT it meant that we could spend a at least a few solid hours fishing each day. Joining me on this trip was one of my James Cook University interns, Elijah, and this kid was even more keen than me to take advantage of our daylight hours by hitting a few landbased spots over the two mornings we were there.
The first spot we rocked up to was a spot I had my eyes on for a while, but previous windy conditions didn’t allow it. You see, it is a bit of a rocky/sandy foreshore and when the wind is up, the waves just pummel in here making it unfishable. After all, they don’t call it blowin’ Bowen for no reason. This occasion however, the winds were the most favourable they had been since I started coming here five years ago.
Elijah began casting while I was still mucking around mounting my GoPro and it wouldn’t have been five minutes before he was on. It ended up being a beautiful little chrome barra either just on size or just under. Either way, he came off before he could be landed and the fact that it is currently barramundi closed season meant that it was always going back in any case. There is a perfect little rock ledge at this spot. The baitfish hide up in the shallow rocks on the high tide but as the tide drops, they have no choice but to retreat back out over the rock ledge in the deep with the receding water. This was exactly where the barra was. A few casts later, I hooked and landed a pretty little mangrove jack (on a 110mm atomic slim twitcher) from pretty much the exact same spot.
How this for a solid landbased Queenfish. This 107cm specimen was caught on my 8-16lb Atomic Arrowz spin rod and the tiniest of poppers!
After a couple of other small hits, we decided to try our luck at another spot we were eyeing-off on Google Maps. It was the mouth of a reasonable large river system. It had deep drop-offs and with the raging tide, I just knew there had to be Queenfish and GT’s there. It wasn’t long before I had one of each and in consecutive casts too. The combo I was using was my ever-faithful 8-16lb, 7-foot Atomic Arrowz spin rod matched to a 4000 Shimano Stradic loaded with 20lb braid and 30lb leader. My lure of choice was a little 65mm Bassday Backfire popper. These things bloop really nicely across the top of the water. Despite the fact I had caught small to medium sized fish on this day, the Bassday poppers just so happen to tame giants as well which I was about to find out!
We chilled out for the rest of the afternoon and I just have to mention that if you’re visiting Bowen, do yourselves a favour and visit Birds Fish Bar at the Bowen Marina. Whilst the food was great, that isn’t the main reason for my recommendation. Birds Fish Bar is located between a couple of the seafood outlets and they often throw fish frames/skins into the water behind the café. There were several XOS GT’s (easily pushing 15-20kg) and one impressive Queensland Grouper who have learned the routine and were there for the feed. We walked a really secluded beach in the afternoon and found a Nautilus shell and a huge Flatback turtle who had just finished nesting and was cruising back down the beach. Check it out in the YouTube video.
The next morning, we went straight back to the first spot we tried and within five minutes, Elijah had hooked and lost another barra which I wouldn’t mind betting was the same fish as the day prior as it was literally the same size and in exactly the same location.
With the bait presence, clean blue water and the drop off, this spot just looked too good for there not be pelagics around. I still had my 8-16lb Atomic Arrowz loaded with my little 65mm popper so I began flicking it out. After about ten minutes, it was completely annihilated. It was screaming off that much braid from the spool of my Stradic that I began to see colours of braid I had never seen before. Yes, it was getting low. It jumped and soon revealed itself to be a cracking big Queenfish. It jumped at least four times before I was able to get it to the shore where Eli tail-wrapped it for me. This Queenie measured 107cm on the brag mat and was certainly an epic catch landbased off the rocks, on lightish gear and on the tiniest of poppers.
You know you are on a remote and little-pressured beach when you find a Nautilus shell washed up.
These atomic arrowz seriously punch above their weight and without a word of lie, I find them nicer to use than some of the more high-end rods on the market. For the price of $180 or $190, you honestly will not find a better rod for that price-point. I can tell you that Anaconda Mackay have an excellent range of these rods in stock. Anaconda in general though will stock them when some of the other fishing chains do not.
We tried another couple of rocky headlands which looked awesome but unfortunately nothing too exciting was caught there. That’s not to say that they wouldn’t fire on their day and to be honest, we didn’t spend enough time there to give a thorough peppering. You’ve just gotta love Bowen though and you clearly don’t even need a boat to get amongst them.
Cheers!
