Fly fishing North Queensland

The trail guide’s pitch for the north is the winter. Temperatures here rarely drop into single figures, and winter is the dry season, so rain does not cut the roads into the dams. Plan the trip for the cool months.

The waters are all dams on proper rivers: the Barron at Tinaroo, the Tully at Koombooloomba, the Proserpine at Peter Faust Dam and the Burdekin at Burdekin Falls Dam. Lake Dalrymple, behind that last wall, is in the trail guide’s words the largest dam in Queensland.

Lake Tinaroo is the water behind Tinaroo Falls Dam, about 14 km north-east of Atherton, and is stocked with barramundi and sooty grunter. Barramundi also turn up in the occurrence records for the lake. The trail guide notes an annual Barra Bash there in October or November.

Koombooloomba Dam, on the Tully River about 35 km west of Tully by Tully Falls Road, is stocked with barramundi alone. The trail guide mentions camping in Koombooloomba National Park and Conservation Park.

Lake Proserpine, behind Peter Faust Dam on the Proserpine River, is about 36 km west of Airlie Beach. It is stocked with barramundi and sooty grunter, and the trail guide says guided fishing trips run there all year.

Lake Dalrymple is the water held by Burdekin Falls Dam on the Burdekin River, about 122 km south-west of Ayr. It is stocked with barramundi. Sooty grunter are recorded there too, but with low confidence, so plan around the barramundi. The trail guide lists powered and unpowered campsites.

Barramundi are the fish on all four. The trail guide describes them working rocky foreshores and headlands, where they round up bait, and that is the first kind of water to look for on a dam this size. Sooty grunter, where they are stocked, are smaller but aggressive, and the same guide says they hide around submerged structure and ambush their prey. A fly that gets down close to the snags is the way in.

Little has been written about fly fishing these four dams. The nearest water with the same pair of fish and a written fly method is Lake Eungella in Central Queensland, where a six to eight weight with weighted baitfish patterns fished tight to timber is the usual sooty grunter outfit. Treat that as a starting point, not a recipe for these lakes.

If you have one trip, go to Lake Proserpine. It is the only one of the four where the trail guide promises big barramundi year-round, and a guided day there is the quickest way to learn a large barramundi dam. If you are based around Cairns or Atherton, Tinaroo is the obvious choice, with both stocked fish on its list. Lake Dalrymple, about 100 km south of Charters Towers by the trail guide’s reckoning, is the big-water trip; Koombooloomba is the one to fish if you are already camping in that country.

The dry-season winter is the easy time to travel, according to the trail guide. Tinaroo’s Barra Bash lands in October or November. For Proserpine the trail guide makes no distinction by season at all. Beyond that, nothing published for these dams pins the fishing to a month, so ask the stocking groups or a local guide what the fish are doing before you book.

Check Queensland’s current freshwater rules, and whether the dam is in the stocked impoundment permit scheme, before you fish.

Sunwater owns three of the four dams and posts current facilities and alerts for them. A line on the map is not access permission: use formed public access, and obey gates and signs.