Equipment and Flies

The rivers bordering the Gulf of Carpentaria are full of marauding barramundi and boiling queenfish.

The shallow coast and river mouths are lined with flats that harbor huge, aggressive permit (Indo Pacific) that will jump on any crab pattern, and there are more varieties of tackle-busting tuna and trevally within easy striking distance than even the toughest fly rodder can handle.The Hoodoo Lodge season kicks off in mid-June, with the first waves of king (Chinook) salmon flooding into the river estuary, and pushing their way up into the river.

From the lodge down to saltwater is only about 8 miles of flat water, which the fish move through quickly, arriving to the lower holding pools just above the lodge in a matter of hours; often, the fish you catch one day were swimming in the ocean the day before! From the lodge upstream to the river’s headwater lake is about 25 miles of prime fly fishing water. The best king water tends to be in the lower 12 or so miles upstream of the lodge, as this water is comprised of deeper, moderate speed, gravel-bottomed pools…perfect king holding water. The fish-counting weir is about 8-miles up from the lodge, and in 2008 the fishing for several miles upstream of the weir was equally as good as below. To give you an idea of the size of the run, Fish and Game counters at the weir believe that approximately 50% of the river’s king run never even reaches the weir, as they spawn downriver, both in the main channel and in the major spawning tributary. So it is probably safe to double the average annual weir count of about 2,000-4,000 fish, a remarkable number for such a small river. Consider that 2004 saw over 6,000 kings, counted! Some days last year we would cut the engine and drift as we motored downriver at the end of the day, and were flabbergasted to look down into some of the small pools and see 30-50, twenty- to thirty-pound ghost blue kings scatter beneath us! Never failed to pump up the enthusiasm…