Barramundi farm brings the fun here

Anglers no longer have to go to Australia to catch them.
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
MIAMI -- The barramundi looks like a snook, but without the dark lateral line. It grows much larger, has sharper gill plates, jumps more often and higher, and fights ferociously to the end when hooked.
About the only people in North America who have caught barramundi had to travel to Australia to do it. But that no longer is necessary.
Eco Barramundi, an Australian aquaculture firm, is growing these snook cousins in three leased ponds in Holopaw, a central Florida farming town. One of those ponds, holding 10,000 fish, recently opened to the public for sportfishing.
It's not cheap -- 800 for four hours for up to four anglers. But you can catch literally hundreds of fish up to about 8 pounds in that period. And for 6 per pound, you can take some home to eat.
"It's not fishing -- it's catching," said Kissimmee bass pro Terry Segraves, who has fished at the farm several times. "Pretty awesome."
Captain Byron Hennecy, whose family used to own the property, is in charge of the fishing operation -- providing rods and reels, artificial bait, refreshments and advice -- although the fish are easy enough to catch without much coaching.
But even though the barramundi are farm-raised captives, they still act like fish.
A little slow
On a recent weekday morning immediately after a full moon, a party of four anglers had to make about a dozen casts of chartreuse and white Berkley Gulp baits before catching the first fish.
Hennecy and Eco Barramundi biologist Adam Schmalz were apologetic, even though the party ended up catching and releasing more than 50 fish up to 8 pounds in a couple of hours.
"They tend to go off their feed a little bit on the full moon," Schmalz said.
Said Hennecy: "Lockjaw."
But once the fish started biting, they crashed the baits on nearly every cast, leaped like circus acrobats and pulled hard all the way to shore. Hennecy is careful to pinch the barbs on his hooks -- not only to conserve the fish but to avoid their razor-like gill plates when he releases them.
They behave a lot like their cousin, the snook -- if they were using steroids and drinking Red Bull.
Instead of gently thumping a bait when they swallow it, barramundi chomp on it forcefully, and then run for cover (if they can find it) and repeatedly jump. The fish occupying the pond are just more than a year old and already challenging to catch on 12- to 15-pound spinning gear or 8-weight fly rod.
Soon to be bigger
"By this time next year, you are going to have to use bigger tackle," Hennecy said. "You'll have no problem catching 18-to 20-pound fish."
The fish were flown from Australia as fingerlings about 18 months ago. Fed special pellets and held in a closed system with recirculating fresh water, they now average about 5 pounds. In their native Indo-Pacific waters, they grow as large as 6 feet and 130 pounds -- orders of magnitude larger than snook, of which a huge specimen is 50 pounds.
Like snook, the barramundi is an estuarine fish, favoring brackish water. All start out life as males and then change sex at 2 to 4 years old so that all large fish are females.
The species spawns in saltwater, producing millions of eggs. Although considered hardy, they weaken and die in waters below 50 degrees. Schmalz is a little concerned about central Florida's sometimes frigid cold snaps. But nearly all of his 60,000 fingerlings made it through last winter, mainly because water in the ponds is pumped from a deep well with a near-constant temperature of 72 degrees.
Schmalz said the barramundi farm is a "pilot study to see if this species could be grown in Florida in outdoor ponds and to see what sort of market acceptance there is."