Most Horizontal Falls footage out of the West Kimberley is shot from the seat of a commercial rib. Fanta-Sea Fishing's second Kimberley episode takes the harder line — two private boats, an orange Blue Dog and the crew's Trailcraft, timed against a slack-tide window and aimed at the main nine-to-ten-metre gap rather than the second, narrower gap that the crew chose to leave alone.
The tide is the point. The Buccaneer Archipelago corner of the Kimberley moves close to 12 metres on a big run, with the rock gutter at Horizontal Falls flushing up to a million litres a second. Fanta-Sea waited for the slack, ran a drone overhead for the visual, then sent the orange boat through on a coming tide.
"We've done the horries, boys. We've done the horries," the crew said once both hulls cleared the squeeze.
There was a nod to Malcolm Douglas, the late Australian wildlife filmmaker who first put the Falls on the broader public map from a Trailcraft of his own. Fanta-Sea called him a childhood hero, and joked about the relative bravery levels involved in running the gap in a small private hull.
"Brother, you have more balls than me. I'm going in the Blue Dog," he said.
Once inside the inner bay, the crew had a window of a couple of hours before the tide opened back up. They used it to test the back corners. The first cast in proved the day. A livey was barely in the water before a shadow-line barramundi flogged it and ran.
"My bait hit the water and he just whacked it and swam right out," the crew narrated, before the same hole produced repeat strikes through a session that ended with multiple sized barra and a thick mangrove jack on the board.
"Yeah, that's lunch, boy. That's lunch," they said. "My father-in-law made my six, boys."
Around the fishing the bay delivered the usual Kimberley extras. Cliff walks above the hole revealed archer fish, diamond mullet and more jacks holding under structure. A crocodile-free pool produced a brief swim. The crew's open admission — "I can't believe I get to come and do this in my own boat" — captured the trip's underlying tone.
Heading back out through the gap and on the drift towards Kingfisher Island, the boys stopped to fish a deeper edge in 40-60 metres. Fanta-Sea was chasing a Dampier-style bottom session — goldens, fingermark, the odd saddletail — and admitted only modest returns on this stop before pushing on.
The net of Episode 2: the Horizontal Falls run is the obvious theatre, but the angling story is what happens in the back bay once you are through, where the current funnels bait into corners that reward a single well-timed cast on a live mullet. The crew rolled on towards the next island and the next leg of the six-part series with the rack already loaded.