I almost didn’t start EmmaLou Fishing.

That probably sounds strange to anyone who’s only known me through the page itself, the photos from fishing events, the days on the water, the Saratoga tagging trips, the odd video here and there. It looks like it came easily… it didn’t.

When I set up the EmmaLou Fishing Facebook and Instagram pages in September 2023, I wasn’t thinking about algorithms or follower counts. I wasn’t trying to build a brand. To be honest, I was trying to convince myself I belonged there at all.

My first post wasn’t even a photo of me. It was a photo of my dad.

At the time I didn’t really know why. Now I do. His story felt easier to tell than mine.

Dad is where my fishing journey started, as a little girl in Pumicestone Passage. He taught me that if you were on the boat, you were part of the team. He introduced me to fish tagging before I understood the words citizen science. He taught me that fishing wasn’t only about catching fish, it was about respecting the water, looking after what you caught, and sharing the experience with the people around you. For a long time, telling his story felt like the safer version of telling mine.

I’d looked at women in fishing on social media for years before that, and mostly what I found was uncomfortable. Bikini-clad women. Enormous barra held up like trophies. Feed after feed of the same polished image, the kind fishing magazines had been running for decades before Instagram existed. I convinced myself it wasn’t for me, and for a while I left it at that.

Then I started wondering whether I only felt that way because I didn’t fit the mould. Was I judging something I simply couldn’t be part of?

No. It had always sat wrong with me, mould or no mould. I don’t think less of the women who choose to share themselves that way, everyone’s entitled to tell their story however they want. It just wasn’t mine. I didn’t want to be attractive before I was respected as an angler. I didn’t want the fish to become a prop, or myself to become something people looked at rather than listened to. I needed fishing to feel equal. Women aren’t there to be ogled at, any more than men are.

So instead of asking whether there was another way to do this, I simply decided social media probably wasn’t for someone like me.

That stuck for a while, until I started following Kymmy Adams, the Women’s Recreational Fishing League Queensland chapter president, and her page called Lady Anglers Downunder. What I saw wasn’t how many people followed it, it was how different the women in it were from each other: spearfishing, fly fishing, offshore trips, family days on the water, every kind of fishing you could think of. Some pages were polished, tile after tile arranged so the fish practically lined up, big fish, big fish, big fish. Others just posted whatever suited them that day. The bikini pages were still there too, and I’d stopped minding, each to their own. What actually mattered was realising it wasn’t the only way in. I remember thinking, you know what, why not, though it took a while for that to turn into anything.

It’s strange how a belief becomes true if you leave it unexamined long enough. I’d grown up fishing, ran events, contributed to citizen science research, competed and won, and become confident enough to fish alone, much to a lot of people’s horror. None of that felt like it was enough. There was always someone who knew more, someone who’d caught a bigger fish, someone with more experience, someone who looked more polished on camera, and somewhere along the way I’d started measuring myself against people I was never actually trying to become.

Some of that came from a team I fished with for years, back when I still believed you needed someone else’s authority before your own experience counted for anything. It felt like you needed to be a professional before you were allowed to contribute. We were confident enough to compete and win. We were strangely reluctant to believe we had any right to be seen doing it. It wasn’t said outright, mostly it came sideways, in jokes and offhand comments and the odd flat “what are you doing” when a camera came out. People like us don’t put our faces on camera. People like us stay away from the media boat. People like us don’t put ourselves on social media. Enough of that, and it stops being something other people say and starts being something you say to yourself. That’s not us. We don’t do that.

The strangest part was that the same environment that produced those lines also believed we were good enough to win. We’re good enough to win tournaments, but we’re not good enough to put ourselves on social media. I don’t think anyone meant that as a contradiction. I’m not even sure they’d have agreed it was one. But it sat with me for quite some time, that you could be allowed to be capable and not allowed to be visible, as if those were two separate permissions and only one of them was yours to have.

When I finally created EmmaLou Fishing, the fear wasn’t really about strangers. It was about people who already knew me. Imposter syndrome crept in. I could hear the conversations before they’d even happened. What’s Emma doing? Who does she think she is? Some of that was probably real. Some of it was probably only ever in my head, and I still don’t know which was which. For most of that first year I told myself people would say what they were going to say, and I couldn’t do much about that. What I could do was ignore it rather than argue with it, I didn’t need to accept anyone’s judgement as valid, only to stop letting it run the show. It’s none of anyone else’s business, in the end. I decided the only thing to do was smile, wave, and keep posting.

The shift, when it came, wasn’t dramatic. In February 2024 I was asked to speak to a group of women about fish tagging and citizen science. I expected polite interest and a couple of questions. What I got was real curiosity. How did you get started? What have you learnt? How would you approach this? They wanted my experience, not my credentials, and by the end of that session I felt something I hadn’t expected to feel: useful.

I wasn’t looking for permission. I was looking for evidence, and that room gave it to me. Evidence that what I knew had value beyond myself, that the things I’d picked up through decades of fishing, mistakes, questions and simply turning up were worth sharing.

Subscribe now

Maybe that’s true for other women too. Maybe none of us are looking for permission. Maybe we’re all just looking for evidence that we’re allowed to take up the space.

The term influencer doesn’t sit right with me, partly because I think most of us carry some version of imposter syndrome and I’m no exception. It makes me think of curated feeds and lives edited for perfection, which has never been what my page is. But if it means connecting with the right people at the right point in time, giving someone a bit of evidence they can step up or step out, then I can live with that.

Most of it comes down to not being a taker. If someone asks me what lure I’d use, I tell them. I’m not precious about what I know, I’d rather pass it on than sit on it. I want to see people catch fish and get their personal best. I’m not worried about someone becoming bigger or better or more successful off the back of something I shared, honestly I’d prefer it. My page was never built on look at me. It’s always been built on this might actually help someone.

That’s not always a comfortable line to walk, though. There are still plenty of times I look back through something I’ve posted and think it feels a bit look at me-ish, and I’ll take it down, or decide not to post it in the first place. Other times I push through the discomfort anyway. I don’t think that tension has gone away just because the page has grown a little. I’m still working out the difference between sharing because it might help someone and sharing because I want to be seen, and I’m not sure that’s a line you get to draw once and be done with.

Over the past year or so, that’s also what pulled me toward writing rather than just posting photos, trying to put into words what I do, what I’ve learnt, what actually happens out there, not just the highlight. Somewhere out there are women standing exactly where I was in September 2023, and I’d like to think a few of them read something here and feel like they’re allowed to step out of the shadows too.

These days, I measure success by the messages, not the followers. Where can I take my daughter fishing? I’ve been thinking about entering Barra Nationals but I’m worried, am I even good enough? How do you’re reverse a trailer? What knot would you use here? My value isn’t measured in likes, it’s measured in whether I can hand someone my own experience and knowledge and let them see they’ve got this too.

Show us what it’s like to fish with kids, including the bit where half of us are terrified about the logistics before we’ve even left the driveway. Show us you reversing the trailer. Show us you’re tying knots. Write about how the tournament actually went, not just the highlight reel. Ask questions, have an opinion, have a voice. Everyone belongs in this space, not because they’ve proven themselves first, but because showing up is most of it.

I don’t think EmmaLou Fishing was ever trying to make anyone an expert. I think it’s been quietly collecting evidence the whole time, evidence that ordinary women can fish, learn, ask questions, reverse boats, raise kids on the water, run events, and still be figuring it out as they go.

If I could sit beside the woman who hovered over the Post button back in September 2023, I don’t think I’d tell her anything. I’d just show her the photo of Dad again, the one she almost didn’t post, and let her work out for herself that it was never really about him at all. It was about learning that her own story was allowed to follow.

Come find me on Facebook and Instagram too.

If any part of this felt familiar, I’d genuinely like to hear about it in the comments, that’s kind of the whole point of writing it down.

And if it’s worth passing on, restacking or sharing it is how other women end up finding their way to this page too.

On our way back to Banyan Farm that afternoon, we decided to stop at a spot known for holding rats: tiny barra. There is a smallest-barramundi category at the Barra Nationals, and while these fish were nowhere near official point scorers, they were perfect for a quick flick and a bit of fun.

Thirty-six centimetres.

Then thirty-three.

Thirty-four.

Twenty-nine.

Twenty-eight.

Thirty-two.

Every fish seemed smaller than the last.

For a little while, the pressure of tides, structure and tournament strategy fell away. We laughed our way through fish that would never trouble the leaderboard, each one somehow more exciting because it was smaller than the one before it.

Rose landed the smallest for our boat, measuring 28 centimetres.

That night at presentations, we listened for the smallest barra award.

Rose missed it by one centimetre.

It did not matter.

That little session, chasing fish most competitors would swim straight past, was one of the most fun we had all week.

As the days passed, we kept adjusting.

During one quiet patch in the middle of the tide, the hits stopped completely. We could keep casting and hope something changed, or we could try something different.

I put it to the crew.

We decided to troll.

Rose does not like trolling. It is one of those fishing methods people either love or hate, and she sits firmly on one side of that argument.

But sometimes you do what you need to do to put points on the board.

Trish had a huge hit.

The fish stayed connected until it was almost beside the boat, then came free.

That one hurt.

Still, the change had given us a chance. We had discussed the options, made the decision together and committed to it.

That became the rhythm of our week.

Try something.

Watch what the river tells you.

Change when it stops working.

Reset when a day is not going your way.

Nobody had every answer, and nobody needed to pretend they did.

The Taj Mahal

Away from the river, both WRFL teams came back together in our Taj Mahal.

The name was generous for a large camp tent filled with six women, fishing equipment and the general chaos of tournament life, but it became our shared space.

We compared notes about the river and talked through what had worked. We shared what we had learned, laughed at the week’s shenanigans and prepared to do it all again the next morning.

We were two competition teams, but we were also part of something bigger.

Donna and Liv both caught scoring barra and removed their tutus. Donna finished 63rd out of 144 anglers with 14 fish.

By the end of the event, WRFL NSW had caught 23 barra.

Our NT crew had caught 17.

Forty barramundi between two all-women WRFL boats in the first year we had entered the Barra Nationals together.

When lines came in on the final day, Rose, Trish and I were together retrieving the boat.

The week had given us plenty to carry home.

We had travelled a river that no longer matched the old tracks.

We had fished through tides that transformed familiar places in a matter of hours.

We had broken a prop in darkness and fog, watched a much more serious incident unfold, reset our plans and kept going.

We had learned where to stand, when to move, who would reach for the net and who would grab the net without needing to be told.

Three women who had arrived without ever having fished together were leaving as a crew.

All six women were already talking about returning.

The Image I Keep

But when I think back to that week, the first image that comes to me is not the flood damage, the fog or the broken prop.

It is Trish on the first morning of competition.

Less than an hour after lines went in.

Her first scoring barramundi safely aboard.

Her hands shaking as the relief hit.

Then the yellow tutu above her head, swinging through the air.

Only a few days earlier, I had collected her from Darwin Airport as a woman I barely knew. She had trusted me enough to step onto my boat and follow me onto a river neither of us fully recognised.

By 9.50 on Day One, she had already proven she belonged there.

That was my proud skipper moment.

Not because I did it for her.

Because I had the privilege of watching her do it herself.

Leave a comment

Rather follow along on social media? Find EmmaLou Fishing on Facebook and Instagram.

Back on our boat, the tidy list of assigned roles was already disappearing.

Once the fish began coming, whoever was closest simply did what needed to be done.

By the end of the day, the boat felt different.

We were beginning to learn where each person naturally stood and fished. We were getting used to how one another moved through the limited space. Nets, rods, tackler and cameras began passing between us without the need for a discussion every time.

Rose brought a quiet precision to the crew.

She had fished the Daly during the previous Barra Nationals and had also targeted barramundi through WRFL kayak events in Queensland. When Trish needed help rigging soft plastics for a fishery she did not know, Rose was the right person to sit beside her and work through it.

Rose’s rigs were always neat. Everything sat exactly where it should.

Trish was experienced enough to ask questions without feeling that doing so took anything away from her ability. She listened, tried different approaches and adjusted quickly.

The Daly was new to her.

Fishing under pressure was not.

The tides were one of her biggest adjustments.

The Daly can rise and fall by around six metres, changing not only the depth but the entire appearance of a fishing spot.

We returned to an area we had fished the previous day, and Trish looked around in disbelief.

“Wow.”

It appeared to be a completely different stretch of river.

I pulled out a photograph from the day before, then pointed high towards the left bank.

There was the tree she had accidentally cast into twice.

Same tree. Same location.

Very different river.

That moment summed up the Daly perfectly. You can leave a stretch of bank believing you understand it and return on another tide to find that everything looks unfamiliar again.

Day Two: Into the Fog

By the second morning, the three of us were beginning to work naturally as a crew.

Then the river tested us.

We left at 6 am.

It was fully dark, and heavy fog covered the entire Wooliana stretch. The light from the spotlights disappeared into the white air in front of us. I could barely see, so I relied heavily on the sounder.

But the sounder showed tracks created before the flood along with those of the previous days.

The river beneath us was no longer the same river those tracks had followed.

About halfway through the stretch, the boat struck something submerged.

We never saw it. We suspect it was a tree or log hidden below the surface.

The impact stopped us suddenly and threw all three of us forward.

Nobody was injured.

I shut down the motor and reached for the torch.

One blade of the propeller had snapped clean off.

The tide was moving, boats were still travelling through the fog and we needed to hold our position before we were pushed into rocks or damaged something else.

I deployed the MinnKota to anchor us in place.

A marshal boat came alongside, and Trevor began replacing the prop from his boat while both vessels used their electric motors to stay steady in the current.

The back of my boat had to remain angled so he could reach the prop.

Everything passed between the two boats over open water.

Tools.

Parts.

The replacement propeller.

All I could think was, do not drop anything.

Trish and Rose did not panic. They found equipment, held lights and passed across whatever was needed.

There was no discussion about roles.

There did not need to be.

While we were dealing with our own damage, another boat came racing upriver against the normal direction of traffic and through the no-wash area.

You do not travel that way unless something is seriously wrong.

Information began coming through about a larger incident down the river. Two boats had struck another submerged obstruction.

At that stage, I did not know whether everyone was safe.

I felt sick.

The marshal crew was needed elsewhere, so I pushed them off to respond to the more serious incident.

Kendl and the NSW boat arrived as we were finishing the prop replacement.

By then, daylight was beginning to push through the fog, but my confidence had taken a hit.

It was not simply the broken prop.

It was the realisation that the flood had changed the river so completely that experience and old tracks could only take us so far. We could do everything carefully and still meet something we could not see.

Kendl knew I was rattled.

“You got this, girl.”

She took the lead downriver and stayed in radio contact, checking in until I settled and began trusting myself again.

We lost about an hour.

Then we went fishing.

Six anglers were involved.

One was the boat earlier travelling back under its own power while filling with water.

The other had to be towed and was sitting mostly beneath the surface by the time we saw it being brought back.

These were not inexperienced boaters. They were among the people who knew the Daly best, yet even they had been caught out by what lay below the changed river.

The larger incident was serious, but all anglers were confirmed safe. The submerged obstruction was later located and marked with a buoy.

It would have been easy for the incident to define the week.

It did not.

Continued in Part Three: The Smallest Barra.

Leave a comment

Rather follow along on social media? Find EmmaLou Fishing on Facebook and Instagram.

The boat was hitched behind the LandCruiser when I pulled up at Darwin Airport to collect Rose and Trish.

There were bags, fishing gear and warm hugs in the tropical heat. Rose and I had met before, but this was the first time I had properly met Trish in person. Within hours, the three of us would be heading down the highway towards Banyan Farm, where we would share a boat for the next week and compete together in one of the Northern Territory’s most respected barramundi tournaments.

No slow introduction. No practice weekend to work each other out.

Just three women, a fully loaded vehicle and a boat pointed towards the Daly River.

Rose and Trish were trusting me with more than their fishing week. They were stepping onto my boat without really knowing how I operated as a skipper, how well I maintained my gear or how I would respond if something went wrong.

That is a big thing to place in someone else’s hands.

I felt it from the moment we met.

I wanted to find fish. Of course I did. It was the Barra Nationals.

But I also wanted them to have a good experience. They had committed their time and money to being there, and they were trusting me to get them safely up and down a river that had recently experienced the worst flood in its recorded history.

None of us fully understood how much that river had changed.

We were about to find out.

For the first time, the Women’s Recreational Fishing League had entered two all-women crews in the Barra Nationals.

I would skipper WRFL NT with Rose and Trish. Kendl would skipper WRFL NSW with Donna and Liv.

Six women. Two boats. One large camp tent that would soon be known as the Taj Mahal.

And three Barra Nats virgins.

Trish, Donna and Liv had never competed in the event before. That meant they would be presented with the traditional yellow tutu on Orientation Day, better known as O-Day.

The rules of the tutu are simple.

It stays on until you land a point-scoring barramundi of at least 40 centimetres during competition time.

Some tutus come off quickly. Others hang around for most of the week. On occasions, an angler has returned the following year still wearing theirs, determined to finish what they started.

It may look like a bit of fun, and it is, but there is real pressure hidden in all that tulle.

First, though, we had to reach the river.

A River Rewritten

We arrived at Banyan Farm on the evening of Friday 29 May.

The Barra Nationals would begin with O-Day on Monday 1 June, but this was not going to be a normal lead-up.

In March, the Daly River at Nauiyu had peaked at 16.42 metres, exceeding the previous record of 16.25 metres set during the 1998 flood. Around 450 residents had been evacuated to Darwin as water rose over the community and swallowed homes to their rooftops.

By the time we arrived, the water had dropped.

The damage had not.

Wooliana Road no longer reached the places it once had. Part of it had collapsed into the river when the bank was torn away, leaving the public boat ramp inaccessible.

At Banyan Farm, the flood had driven so much silt into the opening between the high riverbanks that the boat ramp gap had been filled. The buildup was at least ten metres high. Work was still underway to clear a path back to the water.

We had hoped to do some preparation before the event, but the Daly River region had been declared an emergency zone. There had been no normal reconnaissance and no chance to rely on the knowledge built over previous years.

We would have to learn the river again from the boat.

When we finally travelled through the Wooliana stretch, the scale of the flood became impossible to ignore.

Cars were left hanging near the broken edge where the ground beneath them had disappeared. Houses sat damaged and exposed above places where the road and riverbank had once been.

I had fished the Daly many times.

I knew its bends, its high banks and the stretches where I had travelled safely in previous years.

But the river in front of us no longer matched the river stored in my memory.

Old tracks remained on the sounder, but they could not be trusted in the same way. Sandbars had shifted. New ones had formed. Timber had moved, and submerged hazards sat in water that had once been clear passage.

The Daly had not simply risen and dropped again.

It had rewritten itself.

O-Day

By Monday morning, it was time to begin working it out.

O-Day gave us the chance to check travel times, test different areas and see where the fish might be holding before the competition points started.

I do not fish on O-Day.

It is pure superstition.

If I am only going to catch one barra all week, I do not want to waste it before the points count. I want that fish during competition time.

Rose and Trish were welcome to fish, though. Interstate anglers do not often have the chance to fish the Daly, and I was not going to ask them to sit on their hands because of my superstition.

For Trish, it was a completely new fishery.

She was an experienced tournament angler from South Africa, but she had never fished the Daly River. She had never caught a barramundi either.

That changed on O-Day.

Her first barra measured 43 centimetres. In competition time, it would have been a scoring fish.

As it came aboard, Trish recognised something familiar in the way it fought.

“Ohh, they fight similar to our tiger fish back home.”

It was her first taste of a barramundi, but it did not count towards removing the tutu. She would have to do it again once the competition began.

Over on the NSW boat, Donna caught her first legal barramundi that day too.

That evening, the three first-time competitors were presented with their yellow tutus.

The practice fish no longer mattered.

When the competition started the next morning, they would all be back at zero.

Before Day One, the three of us also talked through how things should work on the boat.

If someone hooked up, who would grab the net?

Who would clear the rods and move the gear?

Who would take the photograph?

Who would handle the app?

It was a sensible plan.

Like many sensible plans made before the fish start hitting, it lasted about half a day.

Day One: The Tutu Comes Off

Day One began with everything still unfamiliar.

A changed river. A new crew. Assigned jobs. Trish in her tutu.

Then, at 9.50 am, less than an hour after lines went in, Trish hooked up.

This was not the small O-Day barra.

This fish had weight behind it.

In the fast-flowing Daly, a barramundi does not give you much room for error. The fight can change in seconds, and every time the fish comes near the surface there is another chance for it to throw the hook.

Trish stayed connected.

Around her, the boat came alive.

Rods were moved. Space was cleared. The net was ready. Everyone shifted into whatever position was needed without stopping to ask whose assigned job it was.

The fish came within reach.

Then it was in the net.

Sixty-five centimetres of competition barramundi, safely inside the boat.

The photograph was taken. The fish was submitted through the app.

Trish had her first point-scoring barra at the Barra Nationals.

She was shaking.

For a moment, there was only relief.

Then she grabbed the yellow tutu, ripped it off and swung it above her head for anyone nearby to see.

The tutu was gone.

The tournament angler returned almost immediately.

The relief became a new instruction.

Let’s get more on the board.

I was beyond happy for her.

I was relieved too, if I am honest.

As skipper, I had wanted that fish for Trish. She had travelled across the country, stepped onto the boat of someone she barely knew and taken on a river unlike anything she had fished before.

Now, before ten o’clock on the first morning, she had done it.

She had caught the fish herself, but there is a special kind of pride in being the skipper who gets to watch that moment unfold.

Continued in - Part Two: Into the Fog.

Rather follow along on social media? Find EmmaLou Fishing on Facebook and Instagram.

What I didn’t expect was how it would remind me of something I’ve been noticing for years now. Every time I’ve invited a non-fisher out on the boat, the same thing happens. There’s this moment, usually when we’re out there with the wind in their hair and the sunrise breaking across the water, when something shifts. They sit back. They put their feet up. Their shoulders drop. I watch the tension leave their face. And then, without fail, they turn to me and say it: “Now I know why you love this so much.”

It’s never about the fish. It’s about seeing me differently. And me seeing them differently too.

When these women come out with me, they’re watching me launch the boat solo. They’re watching me retrieve it. They’re watching me do all of it myself. And I’ve noticed something in their eyes. A kind of recognition. A realisation that this is possible. That they could do this too. I’ll never forget one woman turning to me after watching me work through the process and saying, “Boss bitch.” She wasn’t being cheeky. She was in awe. And what I realised in that moment was that she wasn’t just seeing my capability on the water. She was seeing possibility for herself. That matters. More than I think we sometimes acknowledge.

When I’m on the water, everything stops. My brain stops overthinking. Work disappears. The endless list just falls away. There’s the landscape. The salt in the air. The light on the water. That whole feeling. And I think, watching these women out there for the first time, that they feel it too. The calmness. The sense of having left everything behind, even just for a day.

We’re out there, just existing together. Chatting. Taking in the landscape. And then someone asks, “Can I have a go?” So I hand over the rod. They cast. They ask questions. They get excited. No one’s teaching. No one’s performing. It’s just happening, naturally.

And here’s what I’ve noticed: every single woman I’ve taken out has come back wanting more. They buy their first fishing rod. They start thinking about how to share this with their kids. They ask me questions. They want to know where to start, how to make it happen. But more than that, they’ve found something. A connection. A place that feels like theirs.

Through all of this, I’ve realised something. I value creating that space for someone else. And I value what happens when you open a door and just let someone step through, without agenda, without expectation.

I’ve also learned that sometimes, when someone is struggling, the most helpful thing isn’t advice or words. It’s an invitation. It’s saying, “Come with me. Let me show you something.” Because I didn’t know how else to help. But I knew what the water had done for me.

I still think about that day sometimes. The way her shoulders dropped. The way she turned to me and said, now I know why you love this.

That was enough.

Here is what I did not do. Post about it.

Not because I was ashamed of the fish. Quite the opposite. I was still buzzing from it hours later, replaying the tug of war in my head. The way a 40 centimetre barra absolutely destroys a tiny lure on light line is something else. On BFS gear, that fish feels like a freight train. The rod loads up, the drag sings, and for a few seconds you would swear you were connected to something twice its size. That is the only way I can describe it. The fun is almost unreasonable.

But I did not share it. Because I knew what the response would be.

Ask most Territorians how their session went and the answer tells you a lot about what fishing culture values. “Only a few rats,” they will say, even after 8 hours on the water in perfect conditions doing exactly what they love. Or, “just a few 70s.” The fish were not big enough to justify the story.

We have built an entire hierarchy around centimetres. Rats. 70s. 80s. The magic metre. Anything below the magical mark is practically invisible in the retelling. There is literally a club you can join when you crack a metery, the One Metre Barra Club, and the conversations at fishing clubs can spend entire evenings fixating on that single benchmark.

I am not knocking the metery. Catching a metre-plus barra is extraordinary and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But somewhere along the way, the metery became the only story worth telling. And I think that is where we have lost something.

Here is a detail I find genuinely fascinating. Barramundi start life as male. When they grow to around 80 centimetres, they transition to female and begin spawning. The magic metre everyone is chasing is a mature, breeding female who has been contributing to the fishery for years.

Which means the fish we casually dismiss as “just a rat”, that feisty, scrappy young male who just bent my rod and made my morning, is doing exactly what the species needs. He is not a consolation prize. He is the future of the fishery.

Social media has a lot to answer for when it comes to the size conversation. I say that as someone who loves social media, uses it constantly, and genuinely believes it has done remarkable things for connecting fishing communities, especially women finding their feet in the sport.

But scroll through any fishing account and the message is pretty consistent. Trophy fish. Brag mats. Arm’s length hero shots. The metery with the grin.

What you almost never see is someone posting a BFS session at a culvert where every fish was under 40cm and they came home absolutely stoked. That stuff does not get posted, or when it does, it comes with an apology. “Sorry, only rats today.” As if the session needs to earn its share.

The thing is, social media shows highlights by nature. No one posts the blanks or the slow days or the sessions where the fish were small but the joy was enormous. We are being fed a steady diet of trophy catches, and it quietly reshapes what we think fishing is supposed to look like, and what we think we are allowed to celebrate.

Subscribe now

That is a problem. In Territory fishing, we have allowed a tape measure to set the standard for success. If you have been told, explicitly or not, that your experience does not count unless you are holding something worth measuring, it can take the shine right off. This focus on size quietly suggests to beginners, kids, and women returning to the water that they do not quite measure up yet. That is a quiet way to push people out.

The experience has always been the thing. The moment the line goes tight. The read you make on the water. The cast that lands exactly where you wanted it. The fish that makes you question every gear choice you have ever made in a very exciting 90 seconds. None of that has a minimum size requirement.

That culvert session yesterday was genuinely one for the books. BFS gear, tiny lures, a bunch of scrappy young barra doing what barra do. I came home tired and happy and full of it. And this morning I sat down and asked myself why I almost did not post it.

So here it is. The rats are worth talking about. The experience is the measure. And maybe the most honest thing any of us can do is post the session that does not look impressive, and mean it.

The fish do not know they are small.

Share EmmaLou Fishing

She never sat me down and gave me a lesson. She just showed me what was possible. Turned out that was everything.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where we actually learn to trust ourselves. For me it started on the water, before sunrise, watching my feet for stonefish.

The full story is in this week’s post.