A solo Northern Territory angler running the YouTube channel Hodgie the Barefoot Fisherman has put up a first-person account of February 1, the opening day of NT barramundi season, and chose to skip the boat-ramp pile-up entirely.
"Morning. It is 1st of February, Paris season. It's like 3:30 in the morning. Truck's loaded," he says at the start. "I'm not going to go and launch the boat today cuz there's going to be a 101 boats on the water. So I'm going to go and wander the bush somewhere. So, first barra of open season coming up."
The tackle is built around the new Samurai Infinite rod, a Conquest reel with an upgraded handle, and the entirely Australian-made Jamie Flat bad-breed surface lure family.
"The lure I'm throwing is one of Jamie Flat's bad breeds," he says, holding up a smaller fizzer. "And this one here, this is the 110 big bad breed. And I put some Gamakatsu trebles on that. And I'm going to throw it on the Atomic 7T6 swimbait rod, the 25-pound one."
The water gives him almost no help. The moon phase is wrong, the river is murky and the first thing to show interest in his lure is a saltwater crocodile.
"This croc out. Look at it," he says, watching a snout track the lure. "The fizzer here and a croc's just come over and he's up it. Big fizz. Big profile. He's on it. Did you bite my bloody lure? He's just popped up again. You see him pop up about 10 ft behind. He's woken up to it."
The first bite of the season is a small one. A barra in the 65-centimetre class hits the smaller bad-breed propbait.
"Sound like a piece of fish, too. Not huge, but 65 or something," he says. "So that's on that bad breed I was talking about. That is a really unique sound on these things. They're super aggressive noise."
The day's pattern - aggressive surface action interrupted by snags, dropped fish and lost lures - holds for hours. He drops what he describes as a clear 90-plus-centimetre barra on the strike, then misses what he believes was a metre-class fish on a topwater eat.
The full moon, in his account, is the consistent enemy.
"It's only a one-bar rating. That's full moon. I hate full moons," he says early in the session. "So be surprised to catch anything today even though it's first day of open season."
The day still produces. He works the country on foot, switches between sizes of fizzer, and the small lures keep finding fish even where the bigger ones don't get the eat. By the time the heat builds and the bite drops away, he is calling time on the session early.
The outro contains a deliberate, unprompted ethical reminder that drops cleanly into a video about a high-pressure opening day.
"One thing you got to not do at this time of year, any time of year - this is the time of year when most people do it though, they'll jump fences, start going on private properties and stuff like that," he says. "Don't do that. That's just disrespectful and illegal."
The session ends with a few fish to the bank, six or seven lost lures, and a plan to do it all again the next day.