Decades of attempts to prove otherwise have led me to reluctantly accept that usually, September is too early for the best north-east Victoria stream fishing. While there’s the odd river or creek that can break this rule when things line up, generally, that’s the way it is. The water is too high and too cold, and air temperatures just aren’t warm enough for long enough to get the insects out and about in numbers that are meaningful for trout.
Even a Delatite carrying melted snow is hard to resist!
And yet every couple of seasons I’m inclined to fish a mountain stream in September anyway. It may be more sensible in a fish catching sense to focus on the lakes – unlike the mountain streams, they’re just about at their flyfishing peak. However after months of lake fishing (even patches of fantastic lake fishing) this September the pull of the streams had become irresistible. The deal was sealed when, after a few days of no rain or snow, the forecast promised 48 hours of mild, sunny weather. So Ray and I broke out the stream rods and headed Merrijig way.
Nothing came to the dry, but patiently fishing nymphs close to the bottom produced a few browns and a rainbow.
If you half closed your eyes on the Delatite River and stayed out of the shade, you could almost pretend it was November. But with water temperatures in single figures and the current trying to rip even a tungsten nymph away from the bottom, the reality was different. To catch a trout meant getting the fly deep and slow for as long as possible, which wasn’t easy. No amount of hoping could persuade a fish to eat a dry fly. And when we were rational about it, there wasn’t a lot of food on the surface and what little there was zoomed past. I wondered if there might be an evening rise, but as soon as the sun dipped behind the horizon, the cold air seemed rush off the mountains into the valleys.
Even when flowing faster than ideal, the Steavenson is a pretty river.
We took our time heading home today, spending a couple of hours each on the Steavenson and then the King Parrot (no amount of September sun could hide the fact the nearby Acheron really was too high and discoloured.) On the Steavenson the same pattern continued: heavy nymphs fished short in the torrent caught the odd fish, but nothing came to the dry.
Dark tungsten nymphs seemed to do best.
The King Parrot was flowing more gently but carrying more colour: I was about to give up when I noticed rises in the tail of a narrow rocky pool. Off came the nymph and on went a Bassano Klinkhammer. I crept up behind a log and dropped the fly down into the bubble-line as gently as I could. A 12 inch brown drifted up and sucked it in, and despite being badly out of practice I lifted at the right time. It mightn’t really be proper stream season yet, but it’s nice to have a taste.
(Postscript – some friends fishing nearby today managed to catch fish on Humpys as well as nymphs, so it can be done – at least during the afternoon warmth.)
