Even though it's been a bit over a week since we were last out there, I don't think the water has dropped much, but the fishing was different. This time we only targeted barra but did catch a few other species as well. Its funny because the tarpon were not nearly as active as they had been a week ago and Roggie said that he now knows where the Pied Piper took all the rats. He dumped them in Corroboree. I think the dragon flies out there were bigger.
They were there like the tarpon were last week along the grass edges or hanging on any structure that might be in a flow of water. Like this spot below where the water is flowing out onto the flood plain.
First cast with a 'grey ghost' Roggie had a rat....it's so small you could see his chopped off fingers underneath it.
They were just a hand full, and in the clearer water you could see five or six of them hovering under the fly, nearly every cast. Some would hit the tail of the fly and now and then one would hook up. We only landed twenty three of these, and it was amazing that they could swallow a 4/0 wide gaped hook which was almost the size of their mouths!
Roggie did try a variety of flies and sizes but the larger feathered flies always seemed to have fish at them. Also the floating intermediate ghost tip line seemed to perform better than the 300grn sinking line, because it kept the fly up higher most of the time and kept the fish following.
Every now and then a bigger fish would show up underneath them but they too were only in the 45cm size like this one
Roggie did hook one beauty it was an 80+ and he was fighting it near the boat when another boat came up to have a look, so being Roggie he decided to lift his rod so that the fish would jump for them, and it did. There were gasps of "its a metery" ...."big fish"..."Wow".....then...... "Oh it got off"...bugger. I won't tell you what Roggie said !!
It was so hot out there. Water temperature went from around 29C in the morning to 32C at 4pm, which was cooler that last week, it was funny because at the cut throughs from the Rockhole we saw a flow of darker cooler?? water come through.
Cathie forgot to mention that the last time the fishing started like this was in 2005 or 2006 and I was still learning to fly fish with Wayne Hinton coaching me. We came upon heaps of small fish like this on the first day and only got a few, but a few days later we went out and Wayne got 126 barra while I was trying to get to 80, the biggest was and 80cm but most were the rats that are there. Havn't seen it like that since then. It was also the same yeat that Dave, Rosco and I fished with 3 and 4 wt rods because there were so many small barra, had a ball on the edge of the weeds and Dave (Bowring) got a 68cm on a 3 wt. Lets hope this is another year like that.
ReplyDelete