STORMS AND JELLY PRAWNS

Just back from fishing the flats around Bynoe.  Some big storms came over while we were there, pushing a lot of fresh and cloudy water out of the smaller creeks.  The storms were that violent, Graeme had to pull his boat out each night because it was in danger of floundering in the heavy rain.

With the fresh running out came the jelly prawns.  At one creek we thought it was dirty water that salmon were rolling in but when the dirty water moved against the tide we realised it was a huge school of jellies.  Getting a hit on the fly in these schools was difficult initially, but as the storms laid off the hits started to come.  

At one spot, near the old ramp, opposite China wall in the Charlotte, there was probably a two hundred yard long area, just as the tide began to come in, that had every fish  rolling on the jellies in that two hundred yards just out of the bank.  We have never seen such big blue salmon, we are used to the 40cm to 50cm size, (which by the way are back in schools in the deep holes) but these rolling on the jellies were up to 70cm.

At that spot we found that a white and blue or sea foam DNA fly was unbeatable.  Everything hit it.  From the blue salmon to the tiny mouth almighty's, everything was feeding on jellies.  Barra were boofing right on the edges, so to catch them we had to cast either onto the mud and bring the fly back to the water, or you had to be able to do those casts under the mangroves, that the www. connection.mob (Williams, Williams and Williams) tried to teach us at the Ski Club a few months ago.  That is, stop/pause your forward cast to tighten the loop so it will go under the trees.  That's how I understand it anyway and we had a ball practicing those casts out there. We will need a refresher later on because if you are going to sight fish the flats, you need those accurate casts and be able to get them amongst the mangroves. (Hint for the www. connection.mob).

Just another bit of information too.  When the rain stops, its bloody hot and humid, take plenty of shade and fluid.  The heat seemed to affect a lot of small barra too.  On some of the larger flats you could see groups of them in about six inches of water, and they appeared to be drousy.  It took a fly to hit them to get them to move, and then they would just swim back into their mob.  They were only small, and they seem to be playing, running on their sides and running into each other.  It was only on the edge of these flats that we managed fish, and they came out of the drains, where I assume the water wasn't as hot.

There are huge bloody threadies out there though, rolling on their sides in the shallows and it needed very long casts to try and reach them on the big flats that were too shallow for the boat. (Even thought of walking the flats to get to them.)  You could see them about 100 feet away in Vigilant, going in circles and cleaning up the jellies.  We got a lot of distance casting practice there, but did no good on them.

Knife Island had heaps of bait balls, (not jellies) and the smaller pelagics were herding them up onto the edge of the island.  There was the odd big fish that came through as well, but the smaller fish, ranging from 40 to 60 for the queenies, and 20 to 40 for the trevours, kept taking the flies.

All in all we had a ball, and just a bit of advice, because we wanted a heap of photos, off both the camera and the go pro, I downloaded them each evening off the cameras onto the small computer, then wiped the card clean so I had plenty of room on them.  Now I can't get the bloody computer to work.  So when you down load off your memory card, don't delete them until you know you can get them back.