An afternoon on the Finnis Fresh

Hi all,

I snuck out to the fresh side of the Finnis last night after work.  The first time I have wet a flyrod since last year's Salt comp.  The river is flowing well, but as normal after such a crappy wet, it is that off brown colour instead of the normal nice green colour. 
The usual run off creeks are still pushing colour into the main stream, but the water is black and smelly, not fish killl smelly, but certainly low in oxygen smelly.  I fished around a couple and the results were the same.  A lot of tarpon smashing tiny rainbows right on the surface.  No barra or anything else for that matter in the black water.  It stands to reason that the black water is low on oxygen.  Tarpon use their swimbaldder as an ancillary oxygen absorbing mechanism and can gulp air to supplement the transfer of O2 over their gills, so arent as badly affected by low O2 levels as the standard gill breathers. 
I hooked a couple of barra out of the flow coming from the creeks, but alas, the hooks pulled.  I managed 4 nice sooties to 45cm all caught upstream of the creek outflows.
What was interesting was the lack of munchies coming out of the creeks.  There is usually heaps of rainbows of all sizes, followed up by schools of long tom and obviously tarpon, but not this year.
I did find quite a few fish on snags in the main channel, the usual culprits, primative archers, normal archers, sooties and tarpon, but the barra were conspicuous in their absence.
The few that I did actually see where sitting in that surface layer where most of the O2 is.
I think the freshwater might me a bit tough this year.  It'll be interesting to see what happens when the water temps drop a bit and the dissolved O2 increases.  Things might pick up a bit.
I remember years ago on the Adelaide after a similarly crappy wet, the barra were really concentrated on the rock bars.  Might be worth a shot.
I think the black fish Jim is referring to in Bynoe might be like everyone has stated, they are from the fresh and are just sorting out their physiology to cope with the salt again.  They could be stressed too from the lack of food in the fresh this year, considering the lack of rain on the floodplains.  It will be interesting to see if they are still there on the next set of decent tides.  Are they lean? 

Just for the sweet water folk, I would be inclined to suss out the Kakadu Billabongs this year rather than the Mary.  They seemed to have had a bit of flow and flood this year.  But I think it'll be tough where ever you go in the fresh, but I'd love to be proved wrong though.

Cheers

Dion