When the Hughmungous crew rolled into Roper Bar in late April, they did so on the back of a cancelled dawn service and a half-formed plan. "Tomato Island has a dawn service. It's a really cool dawn service. We're going to go there, but we're not sure. We've heard it's they're not doing it this year and it's closed," Hughie said, weighing the options as the team unpacked the car straight into the boat at the Roper Bar ramp. "So, we might go to the bar and put in at the bar. We're sort of just winging it."
The call to launch at the bar — the Roper Bar ramp, not the pub of the same name — set up what Hughie would later describe as the best trip he has had on the Northern Territory's Roper River. The plan, such as it was, came together on the water: a self-contained ANZAC Day session, fuel topped up at the prawn farm partway upriver, frozen meal packs for the angler battery, and a private dawn service at first light. "Going to have our own little private ANZAC Day cuz the one at Tomato Island was canceled," he said as the sun came up over the mangroves on day one.
What the crew did not anticipate was just how aggressive the river's surface bite would be after dark. "The barra have kept us awake all night boofing on the surface lure," Hughie said the following morning. The first fish of the trip — a chunky low-70s barramundi — came in just before breakfast, and the run of surface eats from the night session, captured on GoPro, set the tone. "I've never seen so many fish in the river than down here this year," Hughie said as he packed up on the final morning. "I think that's the funnest surface session I've ever ever sort of done."
The river also threw the standard Roper hazards. A juvenile saltwater crocodile shadowed the boat in one stretch — "There's a little baby croc. I don't know if you can see it on the GoPro. It's literally tiny" — and one fish was lost when an angler grabbed too early. "Never grab the fish too early," Hughie reminded the camera. Several barra in the 50–60 cm range came in chunky but short of legal length and were measured and released boat-side.
The trip's real twist came on the final day, when the boat refused to start a hundred-odd kilometres up the river. "We got no power to the start of the motor or the trim motor," Hughie said as he unpacked gear to chase the fault. "We checked the starter motor. That's no worries. All fuses are good. If this starts, then the isolator must have pulled up on us. The two-battery isolator under there must have shorted itself."
The diagnosis turned out to be right. With the isolator swapped out of the circuit, the boat fired up. "Stuck 100 K down the river. Long way to row home," Hughie said. "But you fixed her. It works. Good job." The repair was completed with the help of a passing tinny that pulled up to check on the crew — "Thank you to the two blokes that stopped in the little white boat to see if we were all right."
The ANZAC Day session sits in the small window of Roper River trips that genuinely fish well on the surface: high water from late wet-season runoff, baitfish still holding in the system, and barra prepared to commit topwater long after dark. For viewers planning their own runoff trips, the takeaways from the Hughmungous trip are blunt — carry a spare dual-battery isolator, plan for boat-ramp put-ins when island services close, and treat the late-night surface bite on the Roper as a genuine window rather than a novelty.