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It’s surprising that some Barramundi Fishing Charter operators manage to stay in business. We have just completed our third barramundi fishing trip to the northern territory and whilst the fish were good, and we had a great fun time, I’ve got to say that were hugely disappointed with the operators of the business. I do NOT recommend “Prestige inland and coastal fishing charters” (formerly prestons inland and coastal fishing charters) http://www.icfish.com.au We booked last year when it was still owned by Preston (never met him) but his website is still up, making claims about how great things are... some inexperienced business operators bought his barramundi charter business and are making a mess of it as far as we can see. What went wrong? Well a few things that by themselves could have been excused as a business operator learning the ropes, but the final straw has been the saga of actually getting our Barramundi home – more on that in a minute. Stuff ups include: 1. 6 large men (plus driver) crammed into one 4x4 for a 3 hour drive, not so comfortable 2. The website advertises 2 large Barramundi fishing boats, we had one large boat and 2 small tinnies for most of the trip 3. The lunch food quality was woeful – I don’t think I saw a bit of fruit for the whole week, just soggy slammed together salad rolls with canned meat. 4. A lack of drinks and food during the day – not keen on a shared cup with one big container of water – I mean I like the guys I fish with, but not to the extent of swapping spit with them... 5. On the final day a very avoidable mistake was made and one of the boats got knocked out of action – this resulted in NO barramundi being caught on the final day at all, in fact I don’t think we even got our lines wet. We were towed home. 6. The missing Barramundi... The above were kinda excusable, it’s only when you get home and start to think about how much a Barramundi Fishing Trip like that actually costs that you put it all together. But when the charter company makes a concerted effort to rip your barramundi off; it really annoys you. Here’s what happened: It’s fun to keep a track of who catches what - useful later when beer and wine causes some memory distortions J, so for the last two years I have kept a log of all the Barramundi caught by who and their sizes. This year I was pretty careful, and wrote down every Barramundi – even the throw backs. The charter operators job when we get back each day is to filet the Barramundi and pack it up so that we can bring it home, to be clear I don’t spend $2500 on a 5 day trip to buy barramundi - the price per kilo is a bit much! But I do expect to eat my Barramundi. The fact is that when you catch some nice Barramundi, you own them, and it’s pretty good eating anyway... They packed our Barramundi into a poly container and taped it up. Perhaps we should have checked the contents because when we got home there were only 18 of the 38 Barramundi filets that we should have had. To put that into context the 18 filets weighed about 17 kilo, which commercially is about $500... It sure looked like they ripped us off, we gave them the benefit of the doubt and called them – gee oops was the response – we’ll send down the rest asap – it was apparently in another freezer. I can confidently assume now that this was a lie. 3 whole weeks after the trip, they have sent us another container of barramundi – this time we got 7 more kilos, so we are still 9 filets down. Clearly they either think we are stupid or they think we are far enough away and they have our money so they don’t need to worry about us. So this trip in total cost us about $15,000 for the 6 of us. So not only do they massively screw up and we miss out on ¼ of the fishing we paid for, but they try and rip us off for a few hundred bucks worth of fish too... fools. In 2006 we had to leave the river because of some pretty severe flooding – and the charter operators we used that year pulled out their check books and refunded us for the days we missed out on, without us even asking! They get my vote for next year’s trip.
The least Jeff could have done was pay us back some of the charter fees we paid him, and compensate us for the missing fish, we’re all pretty pissed off and I’m sure we’re going to go out of our way to spread the word on how lame his business is. This post is a rant about one business operator – Barra fishing in the NT is highly recommended, and there are some good operators, just do a bit of thorough research and be wary! I will not be removing this post regardless of what they say or do, I will update it if they reply.
Photos can be seen here
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