The road down is quite good although getting chewed up rapidly. Launching involves a fair bit of drowning your vehicle particularly for those with heavier boats but not too bad by Shady standards.
We spent the day up around the top end, not even venturing as far as the S-bends.
After a while hanging around the 2nd barrage right up the top we only found a few rats and some big tarpon despite it looking incredibly fishy.
Luckily we were able to find some hungry barra in a number of locations by looking for colour changes where the water was flowing strongly off the floodplain. We fished mostly along the stretch down from the old boat, along the left hand side going downstream.
The very gusty conditions (combined with our lack of skill!) made fly fishing difficult so we were fishing on the dark side for a fair bit of the day.
However, we caught plenty of willing tarpon during a few good sessions on the fly. They were all pretty big and feisty – great fun on a 6wt. We caught 50 or 60 on a range of flies, particularly a Fuzzy Skull made with the Fish Skulls I got from TZ recently. While remaining unproven at this stage, I reckon a bigger version will be great for Corroboree barra.
We ended up with 7 barra for the day, biggest 76cm. I was comprehensively pantsed by Glenn who caught 6 of them. However, my one fish did have the distinction of falling for an ice jig. After all, barra are just like Arctic char right?
This article was provided by Dave Krantz from the Darwin FlyRodders
