Flying over Castle Creek Crocs

My name’s Mark Christie and I fly a drifter ultralight aircraft out of MKT Airfield near Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory.

I’ve been flying, filming and taking photographs of remote locations for over a quarter of a century.

As the Pilotographer, I take any opportunity I can to find an interesting place to fly to and photograph plus film the experience. Compared to other people and friends that I know from other locations who have ultralight aircraft, I’m very fortunate.

Why? Because I can drive from my home to an airstrip 30 minutes outside of Darwin and take to the air on any number of aerial safaris flying along pristine coastlines with beaches and mangroves, or follow rivers coloured at dark olive green and hiding crocodiles and barramundi beneath the surface. Which is what I did on this flight up Castle Creek.

A much longer version of this video is at the bottom of this post.

Literally minutes after take-off, depending on the direction I head in, I am flying over country rarely travelled on by foot or vehicle. In addition to the incredible landscape, I often encounter wildlife such as water buffalo, crocodiles, jabiru, pelican, along with many other species of birdlife and flying over water, I often see the majestic manta ray, dolphins, sharks, grouper along with schools of fish.

While the top end of Australia is not Africa, a lot of the landscape is very similar in many respects. The northern part of Australia has two distinct seasons – wet season and dry season. Each of these seasons brings with it a different palette of colours that extend across the grasses, trees and earth into the waters as well as the sky.

The rising white cumulus clouds that transform into grey and then black thunderclouds dropping white columns of rain on the green, lush, wet season foliage contrast with the clear blue skies and equally blue seas that seem to balance the stark transformation of a green, wet season landscape into the brown savanna of a dried-out floodplain, or the blackened soil created from a recent bushfire.

I consider myself lucky because every flight will be to somewhere remote, somewhere natural, somewhere beautiful, and possibly somewhere where no one has been before.

I love sharing these images and videos, and here is one such story.

The brown grasses of the dry season now covering the plains either side of the Adelaide River give no hint that during the wet season this area is lush, green and covered in water.

Once the wet is gone, the water retreats until finally it vanishes into the cracked earth that makes up the dry riverbeds. But in the distance, a faint shimmer reflects off the remaining shallow waters of an oasis called the southern area of the Wiltshire’s, or Castle Creek. Pelicans and crocodiles inhabit this location, which is a tributary of the Adelaide River, close to its mouth.

The splashes that you see in the water are crocodiles, startled by my small plane as it flies overhead. Before reaching this location, I had flown over Fogg Dam and its surrounds with thousands of birds and an increasing number of water buffalo have made this place home.

After flying over the area south of the Whiltshires along Castle Creek, this is where the film is shot. I headed towards Adelaide River where I crossed into the Koolpinyah station area and on Koolpinyah station there was a green long stretch of lagoon to the south of an area known as the Melacca Swamp Conservation Area, a secret location known only to a few.

All three of these areas are teeming with wildlife, offering a visual delight for the Pilotographer another flight, another unique experience.

I hope you enjoyed it and please subscribe to my blog or YouTube channel for more videos and stories.

This is the long version of the ame video above… I wouldn’t call it the “Director’s Cut” but for any Fishos heading up or down Castle Creek, it might give a different view to complement their gps and copy of Fishfinder Magazine. You won’t find Castle Creek listed on Google Maps, but you will find it in Fishfinder Magazine.

This is Mark Christie, the Pilotographer signing off.