Mark Berg has finally watched a Tinaroo Dam barramundi commit to the lure, lifting a 105 cm metro-plus fish in front of his Livescope after years of what he calls a personal curse on the impoundment, and using the trip to take on the broader argument over forward-facing sonar at the same time.
For Berg, Tinaroo is the impoundment that has never gone right. "This place for me, I swear, it's cursed," he said at the boat ramp on day one. "Every time we come here, something goes wrong. We were rained on, hailed, we've dropped big fish." His marker for breaking it was clear from the start. "The barra get pretty massive in this dam, so I need to catch at least a metre for the curse to be lifted."
The set-up was a tide-change at 5:30, a major bite at 6:30 and a moon rise just before 7:00. Bait in the dam is heavy, which Berg believes is why the barra are so well-conditioned. "It's absolutely chock-full of tilapia and bony bream. They're so well fed, that's why they're so big."
The first session ran true to history. Barra after barra appeared on the Livescope screen, tracked the lure, then refused at the last moment. "Follow after follow, and still no luck," Berg said as the meter mark started to feel out of reach. "They chase, they turn away. They chase, they turn away. You've just got to get that one that commits. It's painful. It's excitingly painful."
The break came at sunset. A fish that had stopped dead on the screen suddenly inhaled. "He was dead still and then just went bang," Berg said. The fish was big enough on screen that he called the length before it surfaced. "About 105, I reckon." The brag mat agreed. "That's how accurate that scope is nowadays. You can pretty much pick the size of the fish from the beach with Livescope."
With the metre fish on the deck, Berg used the moment to address the argument that has trailed forward-facing sonar across freshwater and impoundment fishing since it arrived. "Anyone out there that says that this is cheating, I agree," he said. "I call it cheating. But let me tell you, it's also not easy. You've got to try and make this fish eat. You've got to work out how deep they are, left, right, which way they're moving. There's a science to it."
His fishing partner Dylan was less defensive. "It'll be like side scan was 10 years ago," Dylan said. "Everyone was against it. You don't need side scan or whatever else. And now every single boat in Australia has got a side scan. It'll be the same in five or six years with Livescope."
Berg is not pretending it is free fish. After three hours on day one he counted roughly 50 barra observed on screen for the single conversion. "We fished for three hours. We would have seen 50-odd barra follow and look at our lures. It's a hard way to cheat, isn't it?" He also acknowledged the trade-off. "You're surrounded by birds and wildlife and beautiful greenery and all the rest of it, but you do have your head down in the screen nearly the whole time."
Days two and three reverted to the curse. Refusal after refusal, one wild barra that swam at the lure and turned hard, and a tally Berg admits matches Dylan's best eight-fish session for the year. "The reward's amazing, right? But you got to grind and grind."
Despite the metre fish, Berg refuses to declare the hoodoo lifted. "The curse still stands for me. There's no doubt about it." The question he leaves for viewers is whether Tinaroo deserves another shot or whether he writes it off for good. "Should we come back and do it properly again, or should we just piss it off?"
