It’s a big call for any aspect of life, not to mention sounding a bit like a 6-year-old on Christmas morning. So, with a few days’ space between now and my return from a trip to the Snowy Mountains, especially Lake Eucumbene, I’m wondering – was it my best lake trip, anywhere? Ever?

As you can imagine, after 50 years of flyfishing, and about 40 of them diarised, it’s up against some stiff competition. The Day of the Jassid at Arthurs Lake in February 2023 for instance, or even Eucumbene herself during that crazy high water action in December 2022. If I went back in time far enough – like 1980s far – there was that session at Bronte Lagoon when dawn tailers turned into midge feeders, turned into blue sky polaroiding. Lindsay and I finished up happy but exhausted and hungry after our ‘dawn patrol’ turned into 8 hours of non-stop sight fishing.

In any case, best ever is a subjective assessment which only an individual angler can make. There are many components besides the purely statistical ones, such as the environment, the company, the nature of the fishing, and so on. In other words, my best ever may not meet the requirements for your best ever, and of course vice versa. With all that in mind, I’m prepared to say that the Snowy lake days earlier this week, were as good as I’ve had flyfishing for trout on stillwater. And, as someone who enjoys lakes as much as streams, maybe that means as good as I’ve had for trout, period.

After a decent few days on the streams of the upper Murray, and then the Snowys proper, I joined mate Steve for a last light fish at Eucumbene’s Middlingbank. It was one of those sessions which could easily have felt rushed, but with lots of other fishing stretching out before us, we chose an easy drive and easy access to compensate for lack of remaining daylight.

It was a good, honest Eucumbene evening, complete with a 180 degree south-easterly wind shift and low cloud rolling in. In my earlier years on the big lake, I cursed this abrupt (and common) change in conditions, but now I just ride with it. Steve had heard the aquatic moths were hatching – a subject in its own right – and sure enough, the big, clumsy insects began fluttering about across the lake despite the cool, damp breeze. The trout didn’t seem quite as excited by that as we thought they should be. However, there was the odd slashing rise, and with a bit of work and some fly changes, we ended up landing a couple of good browns. We thought, first short session and we’ve already saved the blank. Nice.

We were in no rush to get going the next morning. The forecast suggested a blue sky, and sure enough, by the time we headed out at about 10am, it was bright enough to threaten the lake version of snow-blindness without a good hat and polaroids. I can’t remember which one of us had heard that dries were working, so based loosely on the hopper fishing we’d enjoyed the previous summer, I tied on a size 8 PMX with an orange post. With nothing much rising, I fell for the old trap of wanting to use a fly the trout would notice – or move for – from further away. Yes, I’ve seen trout bolt 3 metres for a midge that would fit on my little fingernail. But when my confidence is yet to be boosted, I struggle to shake the primitive belief that trout are basically just little people in fish suits who want a decent steak.

Although I can fish a wet fly ‘blind’ for hours, keeping the faith by playing around with depth and retrieve, I don’t have much patience when bait-fishing a dry. After my PMX had been bobbing about off a nice-looking point for about ten uneventful minutes, I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by the surrounding kilometres of equally gorgeous water. With weed-beds, boulder clusters, half-submerged trees, yabby beds, sandy flats, and dizzy drop-offs enhanced by 15 to 20 feet of visibility into the dark depths, I began to get the sinking feeling that the trout could be anywhere. The whole vast bloody lake looked so good.

I was just about to call out to Steve in his boat that I was going to change to a nymph to cover more water, when I noticed a faint shape appear to my right, heading in the general direction of the PMX. Holding my breath, I watched the shape transform into a brown trout, and then make a beeline for my fly. It hesitated with its nose virtually touching the dry, and then quietly engulfed it. I was so stunned, I actually paused for a second or two, before lifting into solid weight. The fight was strong and nerve-wracking. But it was the rise which captivated me, like something out of a Nick Reygaert film.

With confidence in my fly, and the belief there were fish hunting close enough to shore to be polaroided, the morning’s possibilities were transformed.

Over the next 3 days, those possibilities were realised, and then some. The blue skies persisted, while the wind strength and direction were enough to regularly scatter a generous mix of terrestrial insects – ants, beetles, hoppers; you name it – on the lake, while not blowing hard enough to turn it to surf. Walking and wading the banks of Eucumbene for two days, and Guthega Pondage for one, my confidence that I was going to be able to see trout, became self-fulfilling. I looked hard, walked slowly, tried different directions, angles and elevations. When you know the trout are there, it is no chore to regularly reevaluate the best way to spot them. The slight panic that you might be looking in the wrong place, or not seeing fish that are actually swimming right past you, fades away like a half-forgotten bad dream.

We threw our main effort each day into that 10am to 3pm slot (give or take) of maximum light. Then it was back to the cabin for a cuppa, a sorting of pics, updating the diary, followed by an early dinner, before a leisurely evening session somewhere convenient. On some trips, Steve has gently accused me of going a bit hard, but this time, I simply didn’t have to. After hours of casting to big trout, mostly browns, with big dries, and (incredibly) landing most of them, the need to plod on through the late afternoon doldrums just wasn’t there.

There were enough highlights to keep ‘remember when?’ conversations going for years. Double hookups, trout blankly passing the fly, then turning back for it as if they’d forgotten to pick up the shopping; two that ran me well into the backing (I landed both of them).

But the event which stands out is this. Having had a ball along a particularly ‘good’ shore to my left – moderate gradient, nice weed-bed, excellent visibility – I decided for the first time to investigate a more barren shore curving to my right. Quite steep and bouldery, this one was exposed to the nor’wester, and appeared to have no weed or yabby beds. But would a potentially good supply of terrestrials compensate, I wondered?

I picked my way through the soft sand and around car-sized granite rocks, while trying to keep an eye on the edge ahead. In only a couple of minutes, a large shape appeared from behind a bankside boulder, meandering towards me less than a metre off the shore. By this stage of the day, I’d had a refusal or two on the PMX so I’d added a foam Gum Beetle a few feet behind it. This had already caught some nice trout. (As had the PMX – who can say why some fish chose one pattern over the other?)

My cast went well enough, slightly off to the left, but with the point fly Gum Beetle plipping on the water about 2 metres ahead of the approaching brown. Without changing pace, the big trout sauntered up to the beetle and sipped it down. Two and a half days in, I had my strike pretty much under control, and a moment or two later, the spectacular fish was heading for the other side of the lake, with a leap or two on the way. Maybe 10 minutes after hook-up, I slipped it into the net; at 6 pounds, the second biggest trout of the trip to that point. Nice! I scrambled a quick selfie (Steve in his boat was too far away to contact) and released the fish into the blue depths. I sat on a convenient rock, took my time to dry the flies, reapplied floatant, and… oh, cut off six inches of roughed up tippet above the PMX which had apparently been rubbed hard on one of the many submerged granite boulders.

I stood up, held the flies ready to cast, and to my amazement, immediately noticed another brownie, slightly smaller than the first, appear from around the exact same boulder to my right, on exactly the same track. I barely had time to make a cast before the trout would reach the still-murky water I’d stirred up landing the previous fish. This one swam right past the Gum Beetle as if it didn’t exist, and engulfed the PMX. Five minutes later, I had a 4 pounder in the net. Two casts, 10 pounds of sight-fished brown trout. Was I in Patagonia or Australia?

So if you’re a younger angler, tired of hearing us more senior flyfishers telling you just how good the old days were? Well, it turns out that those days can be right now – if you look for them.

Happy Christmas!