A couple of days up the East

I know, I know, I promised this story ages ago, but you know how it is, time is precious these days, anyway here it is.

You all know Craig, I have written about him and our adventures on this blog many times. Well this story includes him again.  He works in the corporate world of motor vehicle spare parts and his time is more precious than most so when he lobs on the door step we try to make the most of it.  This time we decided to try something new.

We have both fished the East before, but have always headed dwonstream after the Wet and have had some great fun down around the second Magela, but it was July, so we decided to head as far upstream as we could in my little tinny.



As you can see we had some shallow areas to get through and to be honest we didn't really know what was around the next bend, so we just kept going as far as we could.  I had heard stories from a friend who lives in Jabiru about his trips 60kms up river and this is what had inspired us, but I reckon we were about 4 kms up before we couldn't go further.

Log jams were a particular pain, but fortunately the two of us were capable of dragging the tinny over most of them.

Dsepite all of the hardship, it was a beautiful location, crystal clear water and warm sunny days. 

We travelled another 100 meters of so and hit a deeper section that ran unimpeded for about 800 metres.  The banks were lined with freshwater mangrove and paperbark and at the time of the day that we arrived, it looked nice and deep, and definitely fishable, and fish we did.

The night before Craig and I had an evening at the vice with a nice single malt and Craig came up with a yellow thing, same as a pink thing, but with a yellow colllar and the characteristics that a fly can only gain after a couple of glasses of the fine stuff.  Anyhow, it worked a treat and he was in pretty well straight away.

No monster, but you get the idea. 

This little stretch of the East was teaming with life.  We lost count of the number of Saratoga we caught, but again they weren't huge, but they certainly kept us entertained.  Craig did drop a monster, near 90-100cm I reckon, but unverifiable.

The one thing I did notice about the Saratoga was that they were really long and lean compared to the usual billabong variety.  This probably has something to do with the fact that they were living in a relatively fast section of the river and being longer and leaner was advantageous for that habitat.  I'd love to get one in an aquarium and see if they thicken up like the billabong fish. 

We got stuck into quite a few sooties as well.  They seemed to love Craig's yellow thing too.  I was catching fish as well, just for those that are curious, but Craig certainly took the lions share before the hangover kicked in and he didn't want to get out of bed.  Mind you we'd only been asleep for about 2 hrs.

We were able to stay in this little patch of paradise for just over 24hrs and we had a ball.  On the last morning, suffering a serious hangover, I managed to get out and flick a dahlberg in amongst the shrubbery on a floating line and had a ball.  My reflexes were shot, but I still managed a few nice Toga.

Overall it was a great trip in a great river with some astounding scenery and even though it was mid winter with water temps down to about 17 degrees in the mornings we still managed some great fun on the fly.

Here's the view from our camp.

Here are a couple more shots for you to enjoy.

Oh, I forgot to mention the friendly cow.  I think he fell into the river and couldn't get out.  We must have scared him enough to get him moving and it seemed he wanted us to help him.  He managed to swim out to us and then tried to get in the boat.  We managed to guide him into a shallow area where he was able to climb out.  When he got out he collapsed and didn't move again.

Cheers,

Dion