Jim revisits the summer highlight of grasshopper fishing.

The grasshopper action we had back in the 1970s was of paramount importance to our flyfishing.  And half a century ago, there was an important role for some hopper patterns which are hardly heard of today. (And by the way, the English Bibio Hoppers and their kin, are loch-style flies, loosely based on craneflies and the like, not our grasshoppers.)

Anyway, the hopper time plan would be to walk along a riverbank, hitting the tussocks with a stick. Many hoppers would escape into the river, only to be eaten by rising trout. An observant fisher would note where a fish rose, and would then carefully go back and set a trap. The trout were ‘on station’ and would continually rise in the same spot.

It was exciting fishing, and the hopper feeders were often the larger-than-average trout. Around every five or six years, the hopper population would reach plague proportions and the fishing had no equal.

My two favourite hopper patterns were (and still are) the Nobby Hopper and the Berchdolts Hopper. When Don Gapen in the USA invented the Muddler Minnow, it wasn’t long before a Yugoslav immigrant to Australia, Dan Todorovich, turned it into a hopper variant. He and Tom Edwards (who also wrote a biography on Reg Lyne) tied them commercially for Turvilles in North Melbourne. I well remember another remarkable old angler and market gardener from Ringwood, called Fred Stewart. Fred, a rather dour, crinkly-faced Scot, was a onetime president of the Victorian Fly Fishers Association. He was old (or at least seemed it to us youngsters) and apparently had no recollection of the name ‘Muddler’. Instead, Fred always asked the staff at Turvilles for, “them hoppers which have a knob on their head”. And so, from being called a Muddler Hopper, the fly was soon renamed a Nobby Hopper by all and sundry. (For those interested, Fred also features in many of David Scholes’ early writings.)

Incidentally, Dan also tied a well-known mudeye pattern. Formed using a shaped piece of cigarette packet glued to a fly hook, it was then covered with a mixture of yellowy-olive, black and claret seals fur, and had a largish head. It was a seriously good fly when fished at night at Lake Eucumbene, not floating too high but not really sinking either.

Dan was a deep thinker and had migrated to Australia after the war, first living at the Bonegilla migrant camp near Wodonga, and then moving to work on the massive Snowy Mountains Scheme.

As an aside, people like Dan were a salient reminder to us younger generation of the hellish World War which had ceased only a couple of decades earlier. Before coming to Australia, Dan worked with the underground movement against Nazi Germany, risking his life by getting prisoner-of-war escapees back to England through France and Spain. Whilst it was very hard to get him to talk about it, I well remember after fishing late one night, and following quite a lot more whisky than could be claimed as medicinal, his horrendous stories of wartime. I think he retrieved a weapon from a German soldier who, as he put it, had no further use of it, and brought it back to Australia as a souvenir. More significantly, looking back from a distance of many years, he was clearly mortified at some of the actions of his fellow soldiers in wartime – while simultaneously recognising that, in the context of that brutal war, they could not be harshly judged.

In a similar vein, an elderly Australian bomber pilot who died recently, told the story of a deadly split second mistake by a copilot. Without going into detail, that tale explained to me how, despite best intentions, things can quickly go wrong in the chaos of battle. And how easy it might be for us, from the safety and serenity of peacetime, to unfairly lay blame. I reflect that judgement by those who weren’t there, is fraught with risk.

Still today, I vividly remember the stories told by a very special flyfisher who came to Australia from post war Europe, who was there and saw some dreadful things. As usual I digress, but as a much younger flyfisher, I can’t easily express how fortunate I was to hear those well-reasoned thoughts from Dan, a man who was a true but unrecognised hero. In the wide world of fishing with a fly rod, I’ve been privileged to meet and fish with some very special people, and Dan Todorovich, now long dead, was one of them.

Back to hopper fishing. Although the editor and I are in gentle disagreement on the quality of yesteryear’s hopper fishing compared to now, I will acknowledge that, at times, there is still some excellent action to be had during warm, windy weather in summer. I have mates who nowadays drift in boats down the Goulburn near Thornton, or the upper Murray or Tumut rivers in NSW, and on the Derwent and South Esk rivers in Tasmania. All have regular hopper success.

Even on Great Lake in Tasmania in summer, whilst polaroiding for ‘sharks’, a hopper pattern can be a better fly than a beetle on those warm to hot, windy days. No doubt the same can be said for many other waters. Over the years I’ve found lots of hoppers in trout stomachs. They are undoubtedly a favourite food. Whilst modern farming practises may have reduced the huge grasshopper populations of the past, there are still many opportunities.

With hoppers, there is absolutely no need to be careful with presentation. Even the heavy crash of a fly onto the water is likely to alert a trout to race over and devour it, rather than spook it. And no need to worry about buoyancy: a Nobby Hopper tied with high-floating deer hair is hard to sink.

Anyway, if this little treatise on hopper fishing has any impact on the reader to rethink his or her summer fishing, well, I’ll be pleased!