CORROBOREE SECRETS???

There have been a lot of reports on Corroboree lately without many fish, only a few tarpon.  It may be the flies?.  The old trout term 'match the hatch' comes to mind and years ago, in the good old days, I was lucky enough to fish with Wayne Hinton and Dave Bowring out there.  Wayne loved corroboree and was the freshwater guru, Dave like me, liked the salt better, but if you fished with Wayne you caught fish.

The secret?  not really a secret, Wayne would go out with a variety of flies, mainly clousers, but all different sizes and if we were getting nothing on the bigger flies, he would change to a smaller one, in fact we fished maily with the smaller ones out there.  They were sparse 'crazy charlies' on No. 2 hooks. We did use smaller hooks but the No.2 was the favourite and we ended up buying hundreds of them for out there.  The white and salmon colours worked the best followed by the pink.

Ours may have been a little more sparse than these, because we used DNA or EP fibres, but if you use bucktail, it wont take long for the fish to thin them down.

We did go down to No. 4 hooks on some too, but because we started fishing for everything, barra and toga included, with the flies, we stayed mainly with the No.2 hooks. Another point to make with these; use a smaller leader, go down to at least 10 lb.   Wayne would tie a bimini in his light leaders for the fish as well, but being lazy I just used a lighter leader in a good stretch mono like Platypus pre test.

The success of fishing with these smaller flies really got us going, so we moved down to smaller rods,

Dave, Ross Marriner and I fished out there one day with 3, 4 and 6 wt rods, intermediate or floating lines for the edges and sinking lines for in the deep.   There were a lot of boats around that day and when we got the reports from them, they had not caught a barra, whereas, between us we had landed over forty along the edges in the shallows.  Dave landed a 68cm on the 3wt.

I won't guarantee that this will be the secret to end the drought of barra out there, but I hope it may help.

but I remember Wayne and Dave telling me, sometimes the flies that are tied are for for the fly tier or the fisherman more than the fish.

I hope this may help everybody that will be fishing out there.