Fanta-Sea Fishing's second instalment of its six-part Kimberley series picks up at first light with coffees brewed in camp, a Trailcraft and a Blue Dog ready to push through the gap, and one of the more striking pieces of Australian water on the schedule: Horizontal Falls.
The gap itself is the headline. With tides in this part of the West Kimberley pushing up to almost 12 metres, the Falls operate as a tidal squeeze that can flush up to a million litres of water per second through a narrow rock gutter. Fanta-Sea's crew, running personal boats rather than the commercial-rib operators that work out of the bay, chose to wait for slack tide before sending the orange hull through the main gap on a coming tide. A second, narrower gap of around nine metres was wisely left alone.
"We've done the horries, boys. We've done the horries," Fanta-Sea remarked after both boats cleared the squeeze — equal parts relief and victory lap.
The crew paid their respects to the late Malcolm Douglas, who put the location on the map in his early adventure work, with Fanta-Sea describing him as a childhood hero who explored the most remote parts of Australia from a Trailcraft.
"Brother, you have more balls than me. I'm going in the Blue Dog," he joked.
With the orange boat parked inside the inner bay and the tide due to keep them locked in for a couple of hours, the focus shifted to the back corners. The first fish came on a livey within seconds — a clean barramundi shot at by a shadow-line predator that gave itself away with a single whack on a bait that had barely hit the water. From there the crew peppered the hole with live mullet, with multiple sized barra and a quality mangrove jack adding to the rack.
"Yeah, that's lunch, boy. That's lunch," the crew said as the first keeper barra came aboard. "You know what? My father-in-law made my six, boys."
At one point the boys called it like a tropical postcard. "I can't believe I get to come and do this in my own boat," Fanta-Sea said, with big diamond mullet, archer fish and jacks visible from a cliff-edge walk above the hole.
The rest of the back bay produced the usual remote-Kimberley scenery: gum-tree-strewn shorelines, a crocodile-free pool worth a quick dip, and a slow drift out as the tide turned. Heading back out through the gap, the crew stopped to fish a deeper edge in 40-60 metres, hoping to repeat the offshore work they had done out of Dampier — golden snapper, fingermark and the odd saddletail rather than reds.
Across the day the message was simple. The Horizontal Falls run is theatre, but the real fishing was the few hundred metres beyond it, where current-shaped back bays funnel bait into corners and a livey on the right tide is enough. Fanta-Sea closed the episode pushing on towards Kingfisher Island for the next leg of the series — the fish rack stocked with barra and jack, and one of Australia's most photographed pieces of water already in the wake.