Brackish predatory fish in Hawaii?

Hawaii may be fairly questionable as an inclusion in North America, so I'll understand if there's not much help available.

I was poking around the lower reaches of the creeks and rivers on southwest Oahu the other day and saw some fish that have a strong resemblance to barracuda. I saw a total of 8 individuals, ranging in size from about 4-14 inches. This was very close to the ocean, in water brackish enough to have crabs and in one location puffer fish. Google isn't terribly helpful, mostly producing pictures of tilapia and peacock bass. Is anyone familiar enough with the fish out here to say if there are other possibilities, or if I was actually seeing juvenile barracuda?

I didn't have any kind of net, so positive IDs were difficult, but there weren't a huge number of fish anyway. I saw lots of tilapia, and guppies. Few natives. Only a little goby that I could be sure of.

There are three barracuda species listed on http://en.wikipedia...._fish_of_Hawaii : Sphyraenidae barracuda, S. qenie, and S. hellerii. If you look up images are any of these the fish you saw? If not, there are more fish on the wikipedia list I linked to.

Thanks for the links. I had looked at those pictures, and they are pretty close. It's hard to say for sure, since I was looking at a top view of a presumably very young fish compared to the giants pictured. That's why I'm wondering if there are other possibilities that I should look at. I can say it's not Sphyraena helleri, but the other two are reasonable.

Are they some type of lizardfish? From the link above, it looks like Hawaii has a number of them.

Are they some type of lizardfish? From the link above, it looks like Hawaii has a number of them.

Lizardfish are bottom dwellers. Not much chance of confusing them with Barracuda in the field!

True, I missed the last line of not having a net... I've had two instances of people describing fantastical fish that turned out to be lizardfish, and I was seeing if I could solve a third riddle with that one.