Australia's Carpentaria Seafaris

This is where the fish can pull your arm off!

The Gulf of Carpentaria is very remote, even by Australian standards, and only one mother ship can get you there. Captain Greg Bethune and his fish-savvy crew meets guests in Bamaga, after a two-hour flight from Cairns, in North Queensland. The Bamaga pier is the final civilization guests see for a week, as the deluxe floating lodge, trailed by her fleet of skiffs, is piloted from one calm, remote river mouth anchorage to another.

The angling home for the week is the magnificent, 62-foot, “Tropic Paradise”. The skipper and crew move almost daily, targeting the rivers, estuaries, coastal flats, shoreline beaches, and shallow inshore reefs of the western coast of Cape York, renowned as the most prolific salt water fly fishing destination on the planet. It’s a sport fishery that offers incredibly diverse angling options for fly fishermen.

The skiffs chase down bait-busting schools of long-tail tuna, barred mackerel and cobia in open water, prospect for half a dozen species of trevally or blue salmon on shallow reefs, sight fish on flats outside the coastal river mouths for permit and giant herring (monster ladyfish), and head upriver for exciting barramundi and queenfish action.

This is fishing until you cry ‘Uncle”, and if you hit the Indo-Pacific Permit fishing right, it rates as one of the greatest saltwater fly fishing experiences on Earth.

Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria is a sportfishing paradise filled with 54 species of tackle-busting gamefish. This huge (120,000 square miles of saltwater) shallow sea is surrounded on three sides by the northern outback of Queensland and is one of the most remote parts of a continent where everything is considered remote. It’s a veritable sea, half the size of the Mediterranean, that’s full of fish and lined with wilderness rivers that seldom see a soul. In fact, the only practical way to fish for its barramundi, queenfish, mangrove jacks, trevally, Spanish mackerel, Indio Pacific permit and incredible schools of tuna is with the “Tropic Paradise”, a 62’ mother ship that has made this part of the angling world famous.

Captain Greg Bethune operates this live-aboard boat in a style that contradicts the isolation and the entire experience is incredible. The boat is spacious, comfortable, powerful, and ideally fitted for its mission. The meals are first class (especially the mud crab feed), and most important, the fishing program is nearly perfect for the fly fisherman.

The action is often non-stop and can be exhausting. Almost all of the days are guided, though occasionally anglers are allowed to drive their own flats skiffs (2 anglers per) to fish the river mouths, rivers, estuaries, beaches, flats and shallow offshore reefs that line the edge of the Gulf. The rivers bordering the Gulf of Carpentaria are full of marauding barramundi and boiling queenfish. The shallow coast and river mouths are lined with flats that harbor huge, aggressive permit (Indo Pacific) that will jump on any crab pattern, and there are more varieties of tackle-busting tuna and trevally within easy striking distance than even the toughest fly rodder can handle.The fishing is easy and productive, so once anglers get the hang of it they really enjoy the freedom. All of the water is very safely navigated.

Any one of the fish on the “Carpentaria Seafaris” angling itinerary would be reason enough to make the trip. The Barramundi are both vicious and acrobatic. The huge schools of tuna in the shallow (the average depth of the entire Gulf is only 10 meters) sea are an endless attraction and they can usually be pursued until the anglers are exhausted by the catch. There are trophy queenfish in the coastal rivers that often are a meter long and will test the strength of any fisherman and his fly tackle. And for the fly rodder attracted by challenge there are remarkable numbers of Indo-Pacific permit. In fact, each season for the past thirteen years, the skipper of the Tropic Paradise, Greg Bethune, has been able to jiggle a few more pieces into the slowly unfolding Indo-Pacific Permit puzzle. Since nailing a beautiful eight kilo oyster cracker on a Clouser in a Cape river mouth in the mid-1990s, Greg has gone on to guide hundreds of fly rodders to these wonderful fish in the six to eight kilo range.

In a nutshell, it’s impossible to get a grand slam here with more than 4 dozen different kinds of sportfish within reach. There is something for every angler from the challenging permit fishing to attraction of the the non-stop fight with tuna requiring more tenacity than skill.

The trips begin in Bamaga, an outpost community on the southern shore of the huge Gulf of Carpentaria. Once aboard the mother ship, anglers are spirited nearly ninety miles along the western shore of the inland sea to fishing grounds seldom seen by even the native aboriginals.

Cape York is a 350-mile peninsula bordering the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is laced with inaccessible rivers, protected by crocodiles and full of 58 varieties of ferocious fish over the course of the next week, the Tropic Paradise moves each evening and night to new and exciting fishing grounds, anchoring at river mouths where a dozen different exciting sportfish species might congregate, sharing the water with saltwater crocodiles. It’s a part of the world where there is no fishing pressure and the fishing is usually phenomenal.

The Tropic Paradise fishing adventure can’t be exaggerated. It is superb by every criterion and the best endorsements are from the few people that have been to this remote saltwater fishery aboard the only mother ship of its kind.