A day on the river becomes a rescue mission

IT WOULD have been good to avoid a fish kill at Shady Camp but unfortunately one took place.

Peter Cooper with another swamp-dog barra that made the journey from the fresh to the brackish salt and hopefully regained its strength

IT WOULD have been good to avoid a fish kill at Shady Camp but unfortunately one took place.

It seems a lot of big barra died late last week when the rains came, but did not fill the freshwater lagoon to overflowing. Oxygen levels depleted and the barra tried to escape but the barrage stopped them.

Carl Skyring was there to see it happen and he and mates spent most of Friday rescuing big barra.

“The barra were all piled into one area in the fresh, just slowly dying from lack of oxygen,” Carl told me.

“We rigged up a sinker and hook and just threw it over them and jagged them in the head or in a fin, and pulled them in and released them on the salt side.

“It was really sad, but it was good that most put up a bit of a fight once hooked, so they still had some life in them.

“The water was rank; it really stank,” Carl said.

Apparently they jagged eight metreys and a lot of others in the 90s – more than 40 big barra all up.

It seems plenty of anglers were happy to cop a good drenching over the past week in pursuit of some early run-off barra action.

Saul Teague catches a great fish and saves its life at the same time – humanitarian anglers at work on the Shady Camp barrage.

Peter Cooper with another swamp dog barra that made the journey from the fresh to the brackish salt and hopefully regained its strength.

The Daly River certainly attracted attention, and rightly so after receiving heaps of rain over the past fortnight, rising to over 8m at the crossing.

The river started to fall then, prompting a few diehards to charge down and try some of the feeder creeks.

It seems most got a thorough drenching but the fish had still not moved into the main river.

This year, the Daly needs to rise to only just below flood level; that is, below what would flood the Daly River community.

The sooner that happens the better, and the longer it stays flooded the better, so that those lagoon-stranded barra can comfortably make their way to the main river.

Remember, if you head down the Daly, you can’t fish below Moon Billabong Outlet until February 1, and it is sign-posted.

I haven’t heard much about the Adelaide River, but there’s a bit of action happening up the top of the South Alligator, thanks to some early run-off.

All the signs were there; last week following the onset of the monsoon there was a tadpole explosion.

More so it seems than any other river, when the tadpoles hatch up on the South Alligator floodplains, and come back into the main river, the barra munch on them like caviar.

There weren’t huge numbers of fish caught – catches of 10 to 15 barra a boat – but it does augur well for the Aurora Kakadu Klash which is scheduled for March 19-21.