Fishing Styles

Cooktown and the surrounding area offer such a huge variety of unique angling habitats in such a diverse area, its possible to use a huge variety of angling methods. Light spinning tactics in the sweet-water down to the barra and jacks that are awaiting your lure in the mangroves, out to the headlands and reef where some of the biggest, baddest and most beautiful fish are waiting for your pilly. Fish some of the world's most beautiful real estate.

You could be fishing for jungle perch, cherabin up in the sweet-water and the next day out on some of the worlds best marlin grounds. Cooktown is the closest town to the Great Barrier Reef.

Any of the traditional coarse angling methods work. Ledgering and trotting, feeder fishing for pikey bream, grunter, whiting and mullet is highly rewarding for the angler who is prepared to fish with lighter lines and smaller hooks.

Float fishing is one of my favoured methods. There is nothing more aesthetically pleasing than trotting a float down the estuary with either prawns or small live herring. Watch it bob and disappear, then crisply striking, watching a metre of silver power rise out of the water, gills flaring.