Alex's Column 22 January 2026
- katherine831
- Jan 23
- 3 min read
All this rain we’ve been getting certainly has the Top End angling scene buzzing with excitement.
First there was the earliest cyclone Darwin has ever experienced when Fina passed by just a whisker from our door in early December.
It blew a few trees down but its primary legacy was to dump a huge volume of water across the western Top End.
That really stirred the possum and had anglers prophesising just how good the coming Runoff fishing season would be, and when it would start.
Then this month we’ve had another two monsoonal streams, and there is water everywhere.
All the rivers are up and reports of good to great barra fishing have been regular.
Mind you, as happens every year before the Runoff proper starts, plenty of diehard anglers are getting out to test the water (pun intended), and mainly they’re not faring well.
Why?
It’s too early, that’s why.
Sure, there’ll be the odd cluster of barra in given specific locations, all willing and ready to munch on some well-presented lures, but mainly the fish will be moving up through the rising creeks onto the floodplains where the real tucker is.
Likewise, the millions of impounded barra – those fish that spent their formative years in landlocked lagoons across the Top End – will recognise the opportunity to get down to where the real action is: in the tidal reaches of the big rivers.
Often labelled “swamp dogs” because of their greenish tinge from spending their lives so far in the billabongs, these tubby barra form the mainstay of fish caught in a good, early wet season like the one we’re experiencing.
The barra pictured today are good examples.
They’ve come from the upper Adelaide and the main clue to their “swamp dog” origins are their dark tails.
Thanks almost solely to the widespread use of forward-facing sonar, there’ll be plenty of yellow-tailed, silver barra caught in the days and weeks ahead… they are already.
These fish will often be the bigger girls, those trophy fish which harass the mullet schools in more open water around the river mouths.
The two beautiful barra posted in my column last week are exactly what I’m talking about.
Ten, even five years ago, it was so much harder to locate and catch big fish like these, but forward-facing sonar has changed the game completely.
Anglers skilled at using this modern electronic wizardry are drifting up and down the tidal waters, inside and out of river mouths, and won’t even make a cast until they pinpoint a barra.
Unbelievably, some anglers are so good at using Active Target Live sonar and the likes that they won’t even cast to a fish unless it’s a possible metery.
In decades past, you’d be working a school of barra during a hot Runoff session and, if a hooked big fish poked a ponderous shaking head out of the water, you’d be surprised and beside yourself with excitement.
Today, when some anglers identify a subsurface barra as a big one, and it takes their lure, explodes out of the water, and reveals itself to not even be 90cm, not only are they not surprised, but sometimes they are even disappointed.
But I digress… the bottom line right now is that we are in the middle of a great wet season, and therefore a terrific Runoff to come.
Just to substantiate how good this wet season is, my thinking has always been that a poor wet season has only received one or no monsoonal stream, an average wet season gets two monsoons and a good wet season gets three or more.
Two other criteria for categorising a wet season as good or great are just how early the first monsoonal burst happens, the consistency of rainfall thereafter and where all that rain actually falls.
This wet season, all the boxes are ticked so far: the first monsoon came super early, there have been two subsequent monsoons, thus maintaining continuity, and most of the water has fallen just where we needed it too – on the big-river floodplains across the Top End.
Let’s all now wipe our hands with glee and look forward to some bonza barra fishing in the weeks and months ahead.
