Fishing boat smashed by breaking tidal bore on NT river

The fishing charter group did not expect to see a wall of water surging towards them, hundreds of kilometres up river.

But this was a tidal bore — a large wave caused by the funneling of a flood tide as it enters a narrow, shallow inlet — and it just happened to break right over the fishing boat.

Carl Skyring of Darwin Barra and Crab tours captured the wave on camera on the Daly River, south of Darwin, on March 24.

He told NT News he had seen tidal bores several times in the Daly before — usually later in the year when the levels start to drop — but even then they were just "swells that passed harmlessly under the boat".

"This was the first time I had seen one break," he said.