Fishing the Far North: Broome, Port Hedland & the Montebellos

Broome is where the entire fishery is shaped by tide. Spring tides run 9–10 metres here — the second-largest range in the country — and the water moves so far that Town Beach jetty fishes deep blue at the top of the tide and dries to mudflat at the bottom. The shore game runs on that rhythm: the jetty into Roebuck Bay, the red rocks at Gantheaume Point, and the Willie Creek and Crab Creek mangroves.

From the jetty and the rocks, float-rigged garfish or live herring at the top of the tide pulls queenfish, giant trevally and the occasional Spanish mackerel. The mangrove creeks are where the threadfin and the mangrove jack live — fish the bottom of the run-out with live mullet or paddle-tails worked into the snags. The famous barramundi are more a wet-season and build-up fish, hard to find through the dry. The big offshore fishery — red emperor, jewfish and mackerel out to the Rowley Shoals and the Lacepede Islands — is mostly a charter proposition.

A word that isn’t a joke: there are crocodiles here, and they are the most underestimated hazard on any far-north trip. Saltwater crocs are present in Roebuck Bay, Crab Creek, Willie Creek and the surrounding mangroves, and have turned up at Cable Beach and Town Beach. Do not wade in tidal water. Do not clean fish at the water’s edge. Fish the firm creek edges or from a boat, and treat every creek north of Broome as occupied.

Port Hedland is a working iron-ore port, not a holiday brochure, and it fishes better than its reputation. The harbour and breakwaters hold queenfish, trevally and Spanish mackerel through the year, and the back creeks from Oyster Inlet to Six Mile Creek produce barramundi through the summer build-up.

The dry-season headline here is threadfin. The Spoilbank — a large sand bar built up from decades of dredging — is a renowned threadfin spot, and each winter the fish migrate along the Pilbara coast and stack onto it. Work the run-in tide with paddle-tails or live bait, and respect the soft mouth: feed line on the take and lift rather than swinging. The limiter, as everywhere up here, is the tide — Port Hedland’s range runs to around six metres, which is exactly why the Spoilbank Marina was built with fishing access in mind: a reliable window around water that otherwise leaves ramps high and dry.

The Montebello Islands are the trophy trip — a chain of around 174 islands roughly 100km off Karratha, on the edge of the North West Shelf, with over 450 recorded fish species and a DBCA-managed marine park. There is no town, no fuel, no ferry and no resort. This is a charter or private-mothership trip and nothing less.

Most visitors go on 5-to-10-day mothership charters out of Dampier or Exmouth: a live-aboard parent vessel anchors inside the lagoon, and tenders run out each day. Troll skirted lures and bibbed minnows along the bommie lines for Spanish mackerel and tuna; bottom-bounce the deeper edges for red emperor, rankin cod and rosy jobfish; cast stickbaits and poppers at the wash on the outer islands for giant trevally and queenfish. The lagoon pockets even hold mangrove jack on a rising tide.

Two cautions specific to the Montebellos. Britain detonated three atomic weapons here in the 1950s, and the ground-zero sites on Trimouille and Alpha Islands still carry slightly elevated background radiation — DBCA caps landings at one hour per day per site, so stay on hard surfaces and take nothing. And the 100km crossing from Dampier is open ocean: EPIRB, working VHF, a marine-rescue log-on and a life raft are non-negotiable for private boats.

Bring more rod than you’d bring south. For the inshore pelagics off Broome’s jetty and rocks and around the Hedland harbour, an 8–10kg spin outfit with 30–50lb leader, 30–60g metals and 5-inch stickbaits covers queenfish and trevally — add a short single-strand wire trace the moment mackerel are realistic. For creek threadfin and jacks, run a 7ft 15–20lb baitcaster or heavy spin with 50lb fluoro and live bait or paddle-tails. For the Montebellos’ demersals it steps up again: a 24kg overhead, 80–100lb leader and 9/0–10/0 hooks or 300–500g jigs, plus full-sized popper gear for the GTs. Pack spare leader and hooks — there’s no tackle shop within 100km of the islands.

All three destinations sit in the North Coast Bioregion, and the rules here are not the West Coast rules most Perth anglers carry in their heads. The demersal mixed bag is four per day (outside the West Coast region — check DPIRD for the current per-species limits), and there’s no equivalent of the West Coast demersal closure up north. Threadfin, mangrove jack and Spanish mackerel each have their own settings, several reset in DPIRD’s recent reforms. Don’t take numbers off a charter mate or an old guidebook — read the current limits at DPIRD before you go, and screenshot them: reception out on the Pilbara coast is patchy at best.