There’s a saying in Finance which could apply to the first 3 months of this season’s fishing in north-east Victpoia: “What goes up, must come down.” Like Philip mentions in his recent editorial, numbers are ‘down’, but then they are down compared to recent years of great fishing quality and high numbers. Is this year a ‘mean-reversion’, a return to longer term normal conditions?

My first Ovens River fish back in September was a nice brown that sipped the dry of the dry-dropper team. Whilst you might think, ‘sweet!’, I would tend to think, ‘trouble’. Firstly, I could fish a dry-dropper in September, which was because the very low water levels, combined with high temperatures, made it feel like I was fishing in November. Hence the ‘trouble’ of a good start to the season in areas that shed water quickly, threatening a tough middle part of the season. Whilst I did well those first days, I guessed that numbers were down by about half from last year.

Then in October, the catch rates really dropped. There were still some very decent fish around, but I had to cover a lot of water, and the result was that, instead of higher numbers, there was the pay-off in finding single large fish in some mint looking water. In the town of Bright and surrounds, large cormorants hung around and their poop along the river rocks showed they had had a trout fiesta of their own. Could that explain lower numbers?

In November, I spent a few days in a remote part of the north-east with Matthew Howell. We covered smaller streams and headwaters. On some sessions, not only did we not touch a fish, we didn’t see or spook them. And in clear, low waters, that was a bad sign. Cormorants again? They had left their calling cards everywhere and sorties of four or more were now regularly seen flying overhead upstream. In fighter-jet formation, on a trout-finding mission of their own. Hmmm.

We did manage to find good stretches of water, and then for brief moments, the fishing was ‘on’ like it had been last season. Good fish (size and numbers) on the nymph under dropper could still be taken, but quite a few more kilometres had to be covered. Interestingly, in the north-east I have not had to – nor could I – use the Czech-nymph system in the first part of this season. We went straight to summer fishing mode.

Since then, the north-east has received a lot of rain, and rivers that could be easily navigated early in the season, have returned to their more normal big flows for this time of the year. What it means for your approach in the North-East over the next 3 months is that you have to be prepared, more than previous years, to be flexible – and move if a piece of water feels tough.

The good news is that fish are still there, just not always in the numbers that we had become used to. Move location more, explore new waters, enjoy the full experience of a big day out (hey, maybe even take a break sometimes!), practice some new techniques and enjoy simply being there.