As I left Adaminaby on Monday afternoon I stopped for fuel at the Adaminaby Ampol. “How’s the fishing?” “OK, we worked hard but got a few fish”. “The lake’s been going well for the trollers but the fly fishermen are all complaining; one guy said he’d fished four days on the Murrumbidgee and caught nothing.” “Well we did a bit better than that.” “You’d think he’d try somewhere different after a couple of days wouldn’t ya”?

What a great question but I didn’t know how to answer it, primarily because I had too little in the way of facts.  The Murrumbidgee is a huge river and he could have tried ten different places and a host of techniques – or persisted in just a couple of pools with a single dry fly. Anyway, we’d just had a great four day trip, with plenty of occasions when we’d had reason to seriously question whether we were on the right river using the right flies in the right way.

 

Stephen was down from Sydney and as usual insisted on a minimum of three sessions each day – starting pre-dawn; ending around dark. We got off to a cracking early start on Friday morning above the treeline on the Eucumbene and hooked up first cast into a flooded, dirty river. The shower we’d had in Adaminaby had obviously been more substantial higher in the catchment. But for the rest of the session it was tough and more than once I found myself asking the same question: ‘What would Phil do?’ The answer on this occasion was I didn’t know because at that ridiculous hour, Phil would still be having breakfast. I like rivers in spate but sometimes struggle to figure out what the fish are doing. They will move into open runs where the food is plentiful and feed without inhibition under the cover of dirty water. They are not in the normal spots so you have to change tactics.

Whatever weight flies and shot you thought you needed, you’ll need more and you’ll lose a heap of flies in the torrent. But you can shorten your leader a lot – 9 foot is plenty long enough even for short line nymphing. Fishing is physically really tough; the bank edges are all under water so you’re clambering through scrub and over boulders. And river crossing is treacherous – to get out of the flow you’re wading chest deep; in shallower water it’s ripping your legs out from under you. But we weren’t the only fools out. Two quarters of orange peel drifted swiftly past on the current – I’m not promoting this as a strategy, but it did tell us there were people upstream which is always good to know; at this point they had to be at least above the Flying Fox. Now here’s another thing about flood water.  You think because the sun is shining, the river level has peaked. But two hours later I swear it had come up at least another 6 inches. There was no way we were going to wade back across to the southern side of the river so we bailed the last few hundred metres and trekked the cliff face up to meet the Flying Fox road and walked out on the track.

The next three days were all unique. We fished the Upper Murrumbidgee; almost every spot on the Eucumbene between Alpine Creek and a kilometre or so upstream of the Mount Selwyn turnoff; took a trip out to Yarrangobilly; fished below the Tantangara dam wall; and bank fished Lake Eucumbene and Tantangara (risking life and limb to get out of Tantangara after a storm).

At the end of an exhausting Upper Murrumbidgee tussock walking and river wading session, Stephen took to casting from a seated position before leaping into action as a nice rainbow fell back into the tail of the pool to grab his dry.

The trip made me remember how tricky it can be to fish rivers that are coming up quickly and then going down. Trout feed like lunatics when a river’s in spate; then with full bellies, they can get really picky and hard to pin down the next day or two as the river falls.

My observation is that it can take a few days before things settle back to normal. As to what ‘normal’ looks like this year, I just don’t know. As I said in the last blog, 2017 is not 2016 – not even close in terms of fish numbers and size, and the larger browns we caught a lot of this time last year are scarce. But as always, if you really put in the work and try different things, there are fish to be caught.

We had amazing dry fly fishing on the Yarrangobilly, used a duo of big dries and big nymphs on the upper Murrumbidgee and pretty much stuck to short line and indicator nymphing on the Eucumbene. The two best flies were an Elk Wing Caddis, and sorry, but on the Euc it was still a Globug (but nowhere else). Checking under the rocks, the predominant nymphs were small stonefly, with the occasional mayfly, and a heap of caddis larvae in their tubular sand fortresses – with a creamy mustard-coloured grub. We tried every likely-looking nymph in the box but a small black pheasant tail with a tungsten bead probably took the honest-fly prize. Some of the inspiration for this entimological approach came from a recent contact with the Peter Stitcher from River Oracle who gave us permission to use their cool ‘let ’em go, let ’em grow’ catch and release image for our end of season poster for Adaminaby businesses. They have have this interesting DVD/download about storing, organising and choosing imitative flies, CLICK HERE to get some great tips.

A few final thought bubbles. A first hand story from a riverside camper of bright lights and hunting dogs in the middle of the night at Kiandra. We saw a massive amount of pig diggings riverside everywhere we went on the Eucumbene and Murrumbidgee – seriously one hillside spot downstream of Kiandra was like a ploughed field – which might be contributing to the unusually muddy water during last week’s flood. Did the late snow drive the pigs further down this year, or are there more? Last thought; when I was Director of NSW Fisheries we dealt with an application for bow hunters to shoot carp. I don’t know where that ended but the organised recreational fishing groups (from memory) were not in favour because of the concern it would spread to other species. This trip I recovered an arrow from the Eucumbene; the other arrow with the barbed head was picked up from the Eucumbene by Stephen in last year’s brown spawn run. If you see bow hunters it is illegal. Not just for shooting trout, but because it’s a national park. Take some details (regos especially) and contact the Adaminaby police and call the Fishers Watch Phoneline on 1800 043 536. More information on fisheries compliance here http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/fishing/compliance.

Lake Eucumbene is rising slowly to above 43%; Tantangara is rising at 21.5%; Jindabyne down a touch at 81%. My lake pick-of-the-week is Tantangara: it feels like it’s about to get really good. And it’s lovely to see the echindas out and about in numbers. And of course a few snakes!

Tight tippets all

Steve (Snowy Lake Fly Fishing Charters)