Narrabri Fishing Club still going strong after 25 years

The Narrabri Fishing Club held its 25th anniversary celebrations last week, marking a quarter century of fish releases into the Namoi River. 

Club members are dedicated to  the sport of fishing, but also place strong emphasis on improving river ecology and increasing native fish populations.

They’ve released over half a million fish fingerlings into the Namoi since 1990, the biggest release being 191,890 in the first year.

The Treasurer Robert Spencer, also one of the founding members, said the club has successfully increased the number of native species in the river.

“We knew in ‘89 that the fish population was in bad shape, there weren’t many natives around and nobody was doing anything to improve it. In the early days we wrote letters to the minister at the time, and he dismissed the Namoi as an irrigation channel, but we wanted to do it anyway, we wrote a mission statement in 1990 to say what we were going to do with the money and it’s never changed to this day, we just let the fish go.”

As well as increasing native fish species, the Narrabri Fishing Club is also working to reduce numbers of introduced species by holding annual Carp Musters for the last seven years.

Initially the Narrabri Fishing club organised annual fishing competitions, but the Carp Musters began as a government funded environmental initiative, a tradition the club carried on after funding ceased.

Robert is extremely proud of the club’s achievements.  

“When we first kicked off we had over 200 members, today we’ve got maybe 20, but what we’ve got is a very strong dedicated committee that draws people in, people just come on board out of the woodwork,” he said. 

He believes the club’s longevity and success is a result of being careful with money.  

“We socialise big time but we never spend club funds on our social events, everything we do it comes out of our own pocket, the club money belongs to the club and because I’m the treasurer no one can get hold of it,” he said. 

“We’ve got good income.”

The future for the Narrabri Fishing Club is a promising one, members are building a relationship with bodies such as Namoi Water, to try and better co-ordinate environmental water releases and irrigation water releases from dams upstream.

“What Namoi water is  trying to do is get information from fisherman about what goes on in the river, breeding times, and try to marry that time with the watering of the cotton, because the fish are always going to be there and the cotton is always going to be there so we might as well be together on it,” Robert Spencer explained. 

He’s certain the fish in the Namoi are some of the best in the world. 

“I’ve been a fisherman since I was 14 years old, I love eating fish, I’ve fished all over Australia, eaten all sorts of fish, and the fish out of the Namoi are the best table fish in the entire universe.”