Lots to catch you up on........(day one Corroboree Comp)

Firstly the steering cable was not the right size - ^%#%^(*^^&$
    despite me following the manufacturers diagram and instructions on measuring

it was 6 inches too small (what my wife always says!!!!)

But by not placing the cable under the gunnel completely - it fitted, it not tightly!
Whew! buying overseas is cheaper and quicker in Darwin then getting it from the east coast or local but returning the incorrectly ordered item is quite complicated if not impossible!

So I get the boat and camping stuff ready for the NT Fly Fishers Social Mob competition at Corroboree Billabong
I wanted to fish last weekend at the NT Fly Rodders comp too, but painting fence posts on my rural block to earn some extra brownie points for a saltwater trip to Peron Islands late May and putting in the steering cable into the boat took precedent

The Monday of the week before the Social mob comp, things looked good for fishing (see The dry is here) with 8 toga being caught and plenty attacking the fly for one Social Mob member. So all looked very promising for the fishing on the weekend of the comp.
I had always fished this billabong well, while not for barra, the toga were in fear of me! (haha)-
I got 22 in one day leading up to a comp in previous years, the best 84cm of deep slab bodied thick shouldered beauty and power. I had also won a few fly rods at past freshwater comps for the biggest tarpon. To say I was confident of catching fish, was to mitigate my expectations of the trip.
My Deckie came second last year, so we both expected to do well.

I wanted to head out Friday arvo to set up camp and settle in for the weekend
But the wife (even though I had this planned for months) went to a school concert friday night after giving me no notice
This saw me leaving at 4am Saturday morning to get out to Corroboree Tavern by 5:30 to drop off the camper trailer of my deckie who followed me out that morning from town and get onto the water by 6am just before first light for hopefully some topwater action before the sun drove the fish deeper

It was cool temperature wise to say the least and when flat out to a spot very chilling indeed - well before the sun got up anyway. Then it was sun beating down and the constant sweat rolling down the small of your back

First spot we went to same starting spot as over the last few years, which had previously seen 30-40cm togas on the tip sections of a lily vines reaching out into the billabongs and the bigger toga (50+) towards the back of the lilies. at times small barra would be in there too. Previous comps I had picked up up to 15 toga from this 300m stretch leading to a backwater area I would fish mid morning to midday,

But not this first morning, lots of casts for not much. just a few tugs on fly tail tips by small tarpon
the lilies were growing much further into the billabongs than previous years - most likely due to the 300mm less than average rainfall this wet season

Something else seemed off too.............
Was it the not as many baby tarpon rolling and boiling the surface around you. Previous years every time you stripped in those final few meters of line to recast you would have a flashing tarpon attacking the fly
But the tarpon were conspicuous due to their absence of numbers and aggression towards our flies - let alone the apparently absent saratoga as well

It was a tough first day, lots of casts for not much for most of the day
I dropped one nice toga who flipped over the fly on strip strike and rolled off the hook
(due to a lack of recent experience hooking fish??? not fishing in the last 4months maybe)
The deckie lost a few more the same way (these misses would prove crucial at end of comp!)

We did catch some bigger than normal (a normal tarpon averages 16-20cm for the billabong) my best was 39cm for the day, though a couple of houseboaters trolling lures the middle of the main billabong got two at 50-60cm - not bad for freshwater tarpon in the billabongs.


Interestingly, the larger tarpon we were catching were in places previously we had caught saratoga. You would cast in between lillie pads, deep into the shadows of some Pandanus trees fully expecting a toga to take your fly

You let the fly sinking deeper and during first strip come up tight to a fish. You would be expecting a toga from such locations and the fishing rolling around on the end of your leader although fighting hard - had a forked tail and was all silver as opposed to a togas round tail and pink spots. They fight so different to a saratoga, so you know its not a toga within a few seconds after hook up - then comes the disappointment

We shifted around to find the fish (as were all the competitors) but the targeted fish were not cooperating

One of the other competitors who had fished the billabongs in Kakadu for 13 plus years said he had never seen such hard fishing.

Just before lines in for the day's competition, we motored back to the boat ramp and ventured up a backwater - almost totally entrapped in lilies

It took us about 5 minutes to putter into the back water of Marrikia lagoon through a narrow gap in the lilies. and not a fish to be seen despite repeated cast after cast in to likely spots amongst the lilies. there were a few other boats in the backwater who experienced the same thing.
(But the two who eventually won the comp were in there for most of the morning.)

After that fruitless journey, we went back to the boat ramp and went up the small canal near the ramp - told it eventually leads to Hardies lagoon.
About 70metres into it the tarpon were going nuts, the entire water's surface and the edges of the lilies was a mass of boiling and bubbling tarpon for the next two hundred meters - most were 10-20 cms with a few larger ones mingled in.

After such a crazy hard fishing day for not much result, we needed to catch something and a lot of them
So we switched to very light leaders and size 4 skeletal anorexic clousers and began catching a fish almost every cast. We (that is the deckie) had only a few of these flies so when a hook broke after countless removals from the mouths of baby tarpon, we despaired at our dwindling supply of  these tiny flies. The tarpon stripped the materials off those flies to just a bit of thread and small bead chain eyes on a hook and they still ate the fly with gusto!
We racked up a cricket score of baby tarpon - not worrying that we could only have our five biggest tarpon on the scoresheet for the comp - we competed with each other - by adding the centimetres of each fish together as we caught them - in a little over an hour the deckie got 5.33m of tarpon and I got 6.15m. however, his five largest fish overall for the day saw him with more points on the comp scoreboard.
Adding the larger tarpon caught earlier in the day (from typical saratoga spots = see earlier in this blog) - together we caught well over 15 meters of tarpon for the day - not too bad for a hard fishing day - the problem was no saratoga or barra - the high scoring fishing for the comp

More so than previous trips, throughout the day we had several encounters with crocodiles all between the 3-4.5m length. See bottom right side of pic below. This guy's head alone was just under a metre long and he had little fear of our boat as it approached.

however, most of the crocs subtly sunk/slunk into the depths as we approached, leaving a small bubble trail to indicate their underwater escape path

But you never see all that were there - once we were fishing to entrance to the channel to Palm Lagoon and around us you could here the constant honking of the magpie geese on their nests just beyond the first layers of grass and lilies. One mother goose decided to shift house after the young had hatched.

The mother goose flew across the channel leading to Palm Lagoon and was calling her babies chicks to follow her
They came chirping across the 4m wide channel and I commented to Peter (the deckie) on the day or two old geese swimming madly across the water not 6 or so metres from us. He commented on they were lucky a croc wasn't there to eat them. However, as he said it - this 4m crocodile raised itself like a submarine from the weeds lilies and water, moved forward a metre or so and with one large jaw snapping swipe had one, then with a slight turn and another snap - it had the other, and as quickly as it had arisen it faded back into the depths with hardly a ripple on the surface. I had already filled the SM card of my head cam, so disappointingly had missed filming the whole scenario. In recent weeks I had been watching video clips of Northern hemisphere pike take ducklings and ducks but this left them all for its subtleness and vicious finality of this croc vs duckling episode.

We also had a encounter with one of the largest crocs I have seen in the wild. We were cruising about looking for fish and up on the bank in the sun was this beast of a croc at least 1.5m wide in the guts and probably 70cm high while resting on the bank, its head was huge.  I have a 4.75m boat and it was far bigger in length then the boat. It would have been easily well over 5m, if not closer to or over 6m.

While Peter was filming it, I clapped my hand to see if it was alive and as big as it was it moved with lightning speed to spin around and plunge into the water. As soon as it hit the water I hit the throttle to get the hell out of there! Great to watch but I didn't want to be there if it thought my casting deck was a good place to sun itself! or it wanted payback for ruining its sun baking time. There was also a 4.5m near it in the water that was dwarfed by the bigger croc and a 3 footer that was in the grass onshore slipped into the water too as the big croc splashed into the water (see video right hand side).

After a very early start that morning we headed back to camp to hand in our scoresheets. as for the other fly fishers - not many toga caught, only two barra, most got some tarpon or two, a catfish (which was the bonus fish for the day worth multiple times the actual centimeter length).

The special meal for the competitors that night was awesome to say the least. For a pub meal, it was as good as any restaurant in town.
Presentation, taste, and ambiance of the very highest levels - a perfect scotch fillet and vegies, dessert also was classy and delicious.

During the meal all of us commiserated and swapped notes on our feeble attempts to outwit a fish with the brain  the size of your thumb tip.
Many kept talking and drinking till late but I was trashed after such a long hard day - and especially since I hadn't done any fishing for several months due to crook boats and other reasons - so left just after the meal and as soon as my head hit the pillow I was out to all but the world ending!

Day two coming soon! stay online!

also see the NT Fly Fishers Social Mod blog of the event