I’m going to editorialise a bit if that’s okay? In short, in the Snowy Mountains, we’re witnessing one of the greatest periods in NSW history of laissez faire fishery management. And all thanks to Covid. Laissez faire? ‘Now what’s he talking about?’, I hear everyone mumbling as they reach for Google translate. If you haven’t got it yet, it basically means, leaving things to take their own course without interfering. In other words, the slogan for every advocate of anti-government regulation.

Anyway, in the early 2020s, the Snowy Lakes trout fishery boomed. As a resident of the Snowy Shire during Covid, and exercising my right to fish-as-exercise in my local government area, I basically had an area the size of Wales to myself, containing some of this country’s best trout fishing lakes and rivers. Well, maybe not quite to myself, but I could certainly go all day and not see another soul. Most people took the lockdowns seriously and didn’t even hop from the ACT into NSW. On one occasion, as the Victoria/NSW border was closing, editor Phil was on his way to meet me on the Thredbo whilst trying to get phone signal to find out exactly what the hour-by-hour rules were. We held our breath, fist-bumped through the car windows at the road bridge… and then, he had to turn around and drive 8 hours straight back home again.

The trout fishery thrived with less humans. In my 34 years in Australia, the fishing had never been this good. A rising lake over fresh ground added to the recovery, and not even the cormorants and pelicans, there in abundance, could make a dent. Fish everywhere, and big ones in the mix too. All this gave credence to the fishery management 101 reality that you can only kill a fish once – which in layman’s terms means that in a closed fishery (any lake with fixed boundaries is a closed fishery), if we insist on letting fishers catch and keep more or less as much as they want, not letting the fish grow, the fish eventually run out. It’s a race to the bottom. Since the Covid fishery boom, almost every trout fisher in Australia has visited the Snowy lakes and rivers to try for their share of this trout pie.

Has that pie gone stale? Well, as I say, it’s a closed fishery. There is no run of trout from the ocean to replenish supply, no migration from distant seas. We’ve been letting the trout be hoyked out by the freezer-load for cat food or whatever people do with more trout than their friends and neighbours can eat, so of course it’s gone a bit stale. But do we blame ourselves? No… let’s blame the cormorants! Never mind that the Snowy Lakes Trout Strategy hasn’t been reviewed for a quarter of a century, never mind we still have a 5 fish bag and10 fish possession limit, never mind we don’t have boat catch limits, it’s our god-given right to pretty much take as many trout as we want.

If all the reports from the lakes are accurate, we’re experiencing a slowdown at best. Don’t get me wrong, nothing will stop me still going to the best fishing lakes in the world, even if I only catch one or two fish compared to my double-digit catch & release days of the last few years. It’s just that I’m a little tired of any excuse for a fishery slowdown other than regulations which are too slack, coupled with poor angler behaviour. Let’s be clear, it’s not the warm weather, or the cold weather, or an unusual season, or the cormorants, or the pelicans, or any other kind of natural cycle. It’s just we’ve harvested too many fish. We need to own that.

Lake and river conditions

Back to the real-time fishing, and Lake Eucumbene’s peak level for spring looks like being 51.5%; just enough water to still launch the boat at Providence Portal. That was a week ago, today it’s 51.4%, 13% below this time last year. There are a few reports of stick caddis fishing – one of my favourite times of year – and plenty of dragonflies buzzing around, so the over-wintered mudeyes have been active.

Fishing at Providence has been lacklustre, with our first decent catches coming from south of Hughes Creek. Crows, Frying Pan and Middlingbank are the pick of the southern lake bays.

The lakes look amazing. Springtime-green grassy banks and foliage make them as pretty as they get. Lake Jindabyne peaked at 64% – down a few percent on last year. Fishing reports have been scarce and mainly of smaller rainbows before dark.

Tantangara Reservoir is at 8.75%. I’ve had no Tantangara fishing reports but will endeavour to get up there before the end of the year.

On a final note, both the Eucumbene and Thredbo Rivers have had a lean start to the season, and Col Sinclair reports slim pickings from the Murrumbidgee upstream of Tantangara. All these rivers are in top condition and should be fishing better.