Lower Swampy Plain River 25-2-2011

I have been wanting to fish the Lower Swampy for a while now and seen as though I was heading up to a mates bucks party in Jingellic, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to hit the river for a short session.

Arrived at the Khancoban dam wall with Matt Rava at about 7am on Friday morning with the intention to work our way downstream casting lures for some Trout. However the after effects of the beers we had rthe night before swayed us into pretty much staying put on a 200m section of the river.

Much to our disappointment our first few cast were met with annoying little Redfin. This continued for about an hour, at which point we had caught well over 40 of these fish but only a few decent sized ones. Matty's Celta did get smashed by something very big, the size of the run and the speed of the run this fish made lead us to believe that it was surely a big Trout. Unfortunatly the big fella got enough line out to get snagged up and eventually break free. Very disappointing moment!!!!!!!

Later on after a drive downstream we came back to this stretch of the river, except fished the other side. Ravs managed to pull in a very well conditioned and beautifully marked Brown Trout of about a 1.5lb.

Unfortunatly this was the only trout we would land.
The river was in very high flow during this session and I think if there was a little less water being released we may have got onto a few more trout. The fast water and high water level made it extremely difficult to get our lures down to the riverbed where the Trout would have been holding. I will surely return during Autumn!

One thing I should mention is the size of the preserved Trout on the wall in the Khancoban pub, only one has its official measurments on display and was 97cm long and weighed 22lbs, and there was another one next to it that was bigger.

Fisheries @ Old Man Ck, Blowering & Tumut river x 2

Rainbows like this are prolific throughout the Tumut River

Had a few days of work last week so I headed out to the creek for a quick look, we had received plenty of rain over the weekend so I was not overly confident but I was keen for some exercise. I was by a very dirty creek so this was only going to be a short and dissapointing trip. On the way to the weir I was greeted by two fisheries inspectors. This was quite a surprise, what was worse was the fact that my license had expired 14 days ago which I was not aware of and received a very stern warning and had to get it renewed straight away. I was also informed of the fact that the weir is closed to fishing. This is not publicised anywhere on the dpi website but I was assured it is closed.... bummer! Needless to say I didn't catch any fish!

Hooked up to a fiesty Rainbow



Matt fishing a nice run



I planned a trip to fish the Gooba river on Sunday but with it being pretty high we opted to head to Blowering in the yaks instead. Blowering has apparently been firnig over the past week or so and it didn't fish to bad. We both landed a few reddies, but it became pretty hot by mid morning so we pack up and headed into the Tumut river.

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The Tumut is a very attractive waterway

This was an amazing session, clear blue skies and clear, cold water made for some great polaroiding action, we managed to extract 8 fish in the few hours we fished the river with the biggest going appoximatly 45cm. 



The only Brown for the day.

This had me pretty excited and when I had the day off work yesterday I thought I would take my brother up so he could have a crack at the fish with the fly rod. Conditions were not ideal, with ptachy cloud making polaroiding very difficult. However I did manage to land about 10-15 fish all of which were small rainbows around 25cm-35cm mark, only one Brown which was also the biggest fish for the day at about 35cm - 40cm. Not a bad session but it would have been nice to get onto a few bigger fish, haha.

Old Man Creek - Multiple times between the 19-1-2011 & 29-1-2011

With Old Man Creek firing so well over the previous month I felt no need to head off to any other fishery. I had been tempted to head up to Jindabyne to fish the mouth of the Thredbo river, because quite a few reports were implying that it was fishing very well for lure and fly fisherman. But the success I had been having out at the creek persuaded me to stayand chase the natives... after all Australia day was approaching, and it would be un-Australian to chase anything else. ha.
I probably had about 8 trips out to the creek over this time, most of them very early morning with only a couple or afternoon sessions. With the amount of fishing pressure at the weir it was no surprise that catch rates were decreasing considerably.

I figured that with so many lures running through that area the fish were becoming shy or shutting down as soon as a few lures rolled through each day. It seemed that each night thier confidence would grow and they would feed until the lures started the next day. After a few very early morning sessions I found that my first 20-50 casts would produce fish, generally 1-3 fish and then things would shutdown. The trick was to get there early and you would get a fish or two before they caught wind of the lures. This worked for me every time, to the point where I organised an early session with Kanck to video the first couple of casts in order to really prove my theory. In my stupidity the night before I forgot to charge the battery and after the second cast I turned the video off.... third cast he was on to a nice Trout Cod. This was the only fish for the morning and I was satisfying to be able to predict what was going to happen.

The morning sessions were much more productive than evening sessions, with only a few small fish to show from both of the evening sessions. However in saying that there was one moment during an afternoon session that I will never forget, it would have been my 500th cast of the afternoon, I was on a doughnut and all of a sudden BAAMMM my lure was absolutly anhilated by what must have been a massive fish, it was all over in about 2.5 seconds because the brute managed to straighten two hooks on an Owner treble. I'm still not sure whether i'm bitterly disappointed for not landing it or happy to know that he's in there...... Nah... i'm bitterly disappointed, haha.

With Blowering and Burrinjuck full at the moment, they must have decided to release some more water which caused the Creek to rise nearly 1.8m in three days. This made it very dirty and shut the fishing down somewhat. On the flipside to the hard fishing, I did manage to land a very small Silver Perch in this murky water. Up until that point I was a Silver Perch virgin so it was nice to get that species on the board.
Photos will be posted over the next couple of days.