A five-day, two-boat mission into one of Australia's most remote coastlines became a lesson in managing expectations for angler Sammy Hitzke, who learned the hard way that isolation is no guarantee of easy fishing.
The Kimberley had been a lifelong dream. "The Kimberley has sat right at the top of my bucket list since I was a kid," Hitzke said, "sparked by watching the wild adventures of Malcolm Douglas and later Rex Hunt on an old VHS tape I still own today." Flying into Kununurra and launching near Wyndham into the Cambridge Gulf, he and three mates set out to live off the boats and eat what they caught — heavy on lures, light on backup food.
Guiding the group was local veteran Dave from Snagga Barra, more than two decades into fishing the region. "I got this built in 2002 when I used to do the fishing charters," Dave said of his battle-tested boat. "Built it once, built it right." A second vessel offered crucial safety margin against the Kimberley's enormous tides.
Yet the barramundi proved maddeningly quiet. Snag after snag produced nothing, and the crew's assumption began to crumble. "I know it doesn't matter where you go — fish are fish, and they don't bite all the time," Hitzke said. "But there's a certain level of expectation that the further away from civilisation you go, the easier it will be."
A 57cm barra eventually broke the drought and became dinner, grilled whole over coals with the scales left on. Live mullet drew vicious strikes but a string of heartbreaking bust-offs in the timber. What kept the camp fed was variety: fingermark jigged off a rock bar, plus murray cod, queenfish and blue salmon.
The slow fishing reframed the whole trip. "It's actually more about the adventure than the catching," Hitzke admitted. "I'm satisfied with the adventure, but I'm not content with the catching." Hiking down an escarpment to a pool scouted on Google Earth, he found a different kind of reward. "This is one of the most picturesque places I've ever fished," he said. "The fact that the fishing was slow really helps you take a step back, remember where you are, and just enjoy what was happening around you."
He was honest about the challenge of cracking unfamiliar water. "When you don't know a system, you've got to work it out," he said. "If Dave's not catching them hand over fist, then we're always going to struggle." The instalment ends with a tease of trophy fish to come — barra "over a metre, well and truly" — but the enduring takeaway is that in country this wild, the journey outweighs the tally.
