Episode 25: Kinchant Dam Barramundi With Luke Galea

Luke’s Top Tips For Luring Kinchant Barramundi

• Before fishing, take half an hour to find the fish. Use your sounder to locate structure such as weedy points, as well as baitfish. Kinchant doesn’t have much hard structure, so look for points, weedy structure or the recently deployed Fish Attracting Devices throughout the dam. Feeding birds such as pelicans are also a good sign.
• Barra fishing is good year-round in Kinchant Dam. Fishing is easier in summer but in the winter months some excellent fishing can be had by fishing smart. Using wind and natural heat holding structures is a good way to find barra in the cooler months.
• Smaller lures tend to work best in Kinchant Dam. Impoundment fish are often well fed and may not be able to digest a large food item but can be tempted by smaller items.
• It pays to cut your motor a couple of hundred metres short of where you intend to fish and position yourself with the electric motor. Kinchant fish can be shy, especially in the cooler months when their senses are heightened.

Luke’s Tackle Selection For Kinchant Barramundi

• It saves a lot of time to have several rods and reels rigged with different lures, ready to fish. Luke has 2 baitcasters and 2 spin rods ready 
• Luke uses 5ft 6″ Samurai refraction baitcast rods in both the 12-16lb and 16-20 lb line classes. He couples these with Curado or Chronarch baitcast reels, 30lb braided line and minimum 60lb leader. He uses baitcast gear for fishing weedless plastic and hard body lures where accurate casting and close quarter combat is required.
• His preferred spin rods are Sumurai Elevates 10-20 lb and 15-25lb with 4000 or 5000 Stradic or Sustain for stickbaits and soft plastics. He uses this for longer casting when the fish are finicky and noise is an issue.

Luke’s Top 3 Lures For Targeting Barramundi In Kinchant Dam

• 60mm Atomic Semi-hard Vibration Bait are awesome jigged on laydowns and submerged structure in deeper water. They emit a strong vibration and the semi-soft structure gives them a natural feel to fish.
• Bassday Sugar Pen 95mm stickbaits are great for Kinchant Barra over the weedbeds and are one of the lures that works year round, but are a good choice in the winter months.
• Bassday Sugar Deep Barratune is a 90mm suspending twitch bait that’s best fished with at “twitch-twitch-pause” action and remains suspended in the strike zone on the pause.