Retro look to bag barra

Basically, the technique is to troll faster than normal - say, 4-6km/h - with big shallow-to-medium-diving lures, not necessarily near the bank and mainly on the bigger tides.

It never ceases to amaze me when a new technique evolves that should have been developed decades before.

If you go back to the late 1970s and early '80s, the only way you fished the Daly - ie once it cleared and any run-off fishing was over - was to troll 15cm Nilsies, which properly were called Nilsmaster Invincible.

When you think about it, this lure only gets down to about 3m trolling against the current, which also was the only way to troll the Daly.

Fishing with the big imported Nilsie was such a phenomenon on our big tidal rivers that other Australian lure manufacturers tried to emulate it.

Of those, only one really managed to make the grade - to crack the code, so to speak - the Killalure Barrabait.

Again, this was only a medium-diver, although it swims marginally deeper than the big Nilsie.

So, come the late '80s and early '90s, we were all trolling Killalure Barrabaits on the Daly River.

Suddenly that all changed when some astute, forward-thinking anglers began going deep on the Daly.
Warren de With - long-time and current AFANT president - and Neil Croft were the first to use deep-diving lures on the Daly.

They were using mainly Mann's 20+ deep-divers.
"We like fishing the holes with deep snags," I remember Warren telling me.
By the mid-'90s, this technique had earned the pair victory in the Barra Classic, and suddenly deep-diving lures were in vogue and Australian lure manufacturers were actively developing several new models.