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.

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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.