Noosa River Like You've Never Seen Before!

As a passionate team of fishermen, looking after & preserving our local waterways are our highest priority. To do so at the best of our ability we believe we must understand what is going on beneath the surface before we begin our mission. That’s where our ‘Clean Water Projects’ & ‘Our Oceans Future’ come into play. As a team we’ve been working on kickstarting this program for over three years now & its getting close to being released, so stay tuned!!

‘Our mission is to create an abundance of fish life, rather than sustain it and keep it on the same level as it is. We want it to be the same, if not better than what it was 100 years ago!’

#OUROCEANSFUTURE

The idea first formed back in 2018 when Heathy & Eli (Robinson Brothers) began to free dive the Noosa River collecting rubbish. Diving in search for rubbish very quickly turned into diving & filming fish & other marine life after they released the large abundance of fish below the surface. Being the boys local river system, naturally they wanted to explore further, dive deeper & learn more about the marine life in their home town & whether they can help improve it. After releasing some incredible footage of swimming with wild Barramundi & receiving a huge response from the community, the boys new they had a gem at their fingertips & decided to use it to help kickstart ‘Our Oceans Future.’ From here, with the help & partnership of SCF, it has now grown into what you are viewing now!

The first of our many goals is to SHOW the community the abundance of marine life that lives beneath the surface, in locations such as the very popular ‘Noosa River.’ Why do we want to show them this you ask? Well its simple we need the people that live, work, play, holiday ect in locations such as Noosa to understand firstly, the amount of marine life so close to home & secondly the impact they could be having on this marine life. So if they don’t know what’s down their to start with they will never know how to help, due to this we will purposely be targeting the more popular locations as such, to reach a larger, more powerful audience. Once we have the community’s attention, our second goal is to TEACH them about things such as species, fish health & numbers & any possible human impact, they can help with. Finally once we have shown & taught the community about the marine life that lives beneath the surface in such popular locations, we want to WORK TOGETHER with them to improve the fish & marine life. We already see a way of sustaining our water ways & maintaining them at the state they are today, however we want to go further, we want to go above & beyond, we want to create an ABUNDANCE of fish & marine life, similar to what it would have been like 100 years ago! Our ideal outcome is for people of all ages & skill levels to be able to travel to any location & catch a number of different size & species of fish.

Although we absolutely love doing projects like this, it definitely doesnt come easily. Alot of time, effort & planning goes into successfully producing one of these projects. The first & most obvious is the time that they take. The major time consuming factors are, travel, filming, sorting footage & then producing the footage into a video however, on top of this post production development (what you are reading now) & then further promotion also take a large chunk of time, & before you know it you’ve spent months producing a 5 minute video & 1500 word blog post. Realistically we could produce a a full project in 1-2 weeks if we had no other commitments & perfect weather. Weather is a huge factor to a successful project, especially as all of our footage is filmed underwater. Therefore for us to actually be able to head to a destination and film, we need excellent water clarity, which requires the location to have had minimal recent rain fall, little or no boat/human traffic & in some instances little or no swell. These factors as well as the time of year (seasonal factors) & wind speed & direction all contribute to the clarity of the water. So finding a time where all these factors line up, especially in such popular locations is very rare.

HABITAT

The Noosa River is home to a huge variety of habitats that 100’s of species of fish call home. These habits consist of natural structures such as mangroves, rock shelves & loose logs/trees, as well as man-made structures that include rock walls, jetties & pontoons, mored boats & large geotextile sandbags. A perfect example of an amazing habitat in the River at the moment is the stretch of water along the dog beach, due to erosion the bank has washed away & the majority of the trees along the dog beach have been washed into the water creating homes & structure for a variety of fish. However, if the river was to experience a large swell on a king tide, it would be highly likely that these loose trees & logs that are creating the habitat for the fish would be washed away, leaving nothing but sand & a large number of fish forced to find a new home.

CLIMATE

The change in climate & temperature of the water in the river can be considered good & bad. A perfect example is the huge number of Barramundi living in the river these days. Barramundi are very picky when it comes to where they live & are only really seen & caught in waters that are between 20-30 degrees celsius, so, therefore, the rise in annual temperature is having a positive impact on Noosa’s Barramundi fishery. However, due to this rise in water temperature the river has seen a huge depletion in Mullet numbers. 5 years ago the river would experiences an annual ‘mullet run’ where thousands of mullet would flood into the river to breed. But over the last couple of years, the river hasn’t experienced one. Is this due to climate change, what do you think?

WATER QUALITY

Good water quality is always a bonus when visiting the Noosa river, as it is absolutely beautiful when clear, with endless opportunities for swimming, snorkeling, photography & obviously projects such as these. However, the river always isn’t picture perfect & clear, in fact after a slight amount of rain the river becomes quite dirty. This is the case as the river consists of a number of lakes that creeks & small streams from all around the Noosa hinterland, run into. As these streams & creeks runoff into the river, sediment is collected along the way, & dirty water is created. Although the river can get quite dirty, quite quickly at times, it clears up twice as fast. This is again due to the number of lakes throughout the system, as when the dirty rainwater from upstream passes through the lakes, the water disperses, slows down & somewhat filters the water. From a fishermen’s perspective, clean water isn’t also the best for fishing, & the darker, dirtier water is actually preferred. With more than a lifetime's worth of fishing experience between us here at SCF, we all agree that clean water means very hard fishing conditions. We don’t exactly know why this is the case, but we can only assume it’s because the fish are more cautious of lures, baits & especially boat action due to being able to see them better.

HUMAN IMPACTS

We as humans have a number of positive & negative impacts on earth & it is visible in locations like the small ecosystem that is the Noosa River. The majority of the negative impacts on fish life took place a number of years ago by recreational fishermen. Approximately 60 years ago the river was full of monster ‘Giant Trevally,’ a fish we as keen fishermen work so hard for these days. In local tackle stores & restaurants around Noosa, old images of local fishermen can be seen displaying 8-12 dead Giant Trevally, weighing approximately 30kg+ and measuring well over a metre long. These days we struggle to land a GT in the river that is more than 60cm in length, showing that the GT fishing in the Noose river has depleted drastically & will never be what it used to be. The main reason for this is we as humans catching & killing more fish than what is necessary.

There is a lot to be discovered & learnt when diving into small marine ecosystems like Noosa, in fact in just the three years we have been doing so we’ve come across & learnt some very interesting things. The most exciting & definitely the coolest is learning the time of year & location of the Barramundi school to breed. This as well as learning what kind of habitats different species of fish prefer, how they feed, act & position themselves depending on things such as tide, water temperature & moon phases. We as very passionate fishermen find this all very interesting as it helps us understand the fish & their habits & enables us to target & catch these fish more regularly. On top of fish behaviour, we also come across marine creatures you wouldn’t expect to see in such a small river system. Things such as turtles, large jellyfish, moray eels, fully grown QLD grouper, all different species of shark & even types of coral & algae we didn’t know our river had until we started diving it.

Let us work together as one and preserve, maintain and make a positive change to the ecosystems and waterways we all love so much. Do your part today, tomorrow, the day after that, and every day to come so the future generations of our planet can enjoy the same things we do!