Year 8 Tech Mandatory

Snowy Mountains Trout Tour April 18th -22nd 2011

Finally our Snowy Mountains Trout tour had arrived. Myself, Michael Kanck and Matt Kanck, had organised to fish a variety of Snowy Mountain dams and streams over the course of a few days. We based ourselves in Old Adaminaby because it was central to all the places we wanted to fish. With a lot of talk about early spawning runs, we planned on fishing areas that had rivers running into them. Creel Bay, Anglers Reach and the top end of Tantangra. The plan was to fish the impoundments in the morning from our Hobie Outbacks and hit up a stream or river of an afternoon.

Tuesday 19th

Had a morning session at Creel Bay on Lake Jindabyne. Michael had fished this bay three weeks earlier and had a great session, so hopes were high. Started fishing at about 7.30am and trolled up to the Thredbo River. A disappointing session with only 6 small Atlantic Salmon boated. We had a walk up the Thredbo for a kilometre or so and sighted quite a few big fish, but couldn't manage to get a strike out of them. We headed off back to Old Adaminiby a little disappointed.

Michael had sussed out a little stream for the afternoon, and he assured us that it had plenty of small trout and the odd big fella in the pools. The stream will remain undisclosed because of its size and how good it fished. The majority of the stream was only 3-8 feet wide with a pool every 100m or so. We landed plenty of small fish, but our eyes were really opened when Matt Kanck hooked up to a 4lb Rainbow in one of the pools. Another 30 minutes later and I hooked up to another nice fish, a 3lb rainbow. Both of these fish were quite old, their jaws were pretty weathered!

This really improved our day after the poor session at Jindy.

Wednesday 20th

Started the day of with a nice session on Eucumbene. An average Eucumbene session of about 25 rainbows between the three of us, was a pleasing start to the day. Michel also managed to land a nice Brown on our way back to the car. The weather wasn't great with a few showers and a little bit of wind, but it didn't effect the fishing which was the main thing.

The afternoon was spent at Providence Portal and the Eucumbene. Again this stream session was very productive, with another 20 odd fish landed, a few nice ones as well. This session was also dominated by Rainbows, with only a couple of small browns landed.

Thursday 21st

The plan for this day was to fish the top end of Tantangra, where the Murrumbidgee is. This plan was quickly thrown out the window after a 40 minute bog session on the track that lead to the top end. So we put the yaks in down near the dam wall... what a good decision. The day started at 8.30am and finished at 3pm with 72 fish boated for that time. 5.5lb rainbows were the biggest, with the average rainbow coming in at between 3lb & 4lb. Big rainbows made up half or the catch and small browns accounted for the rest. The fight in the small browns was unbelievable! We left the dam fully satisfied with our efforts and agreed that any more fish for the trip would be a bonus.

Spent a short session on a small stream that afternoon and landed a couple of nice Rainbows.

Friday 22nd

The plan for today was to explore a few spots on the Eucumbene river between the lake and Kiandra. However a last minute decision had us stopping in for a short session at Providence again. This ended up being a great decision! We ended up cleaning up on good browns, with about 6 or 7 landed for the hour.

We stopped at two other places on the Eucumbene River, one of which was Suicide hole. It looked very good, but it didn't produce for us.

Overall the trip was a great success, with plenty of quality fish landed and a few new places sussed out! We all trialled a few new techniques, some of which were very successful. The highlight for me was Tantangra Dam, it was 1000 times better than I expected it to be, and also very easy to fish a consistent depth. The final total for the trip was up around the 170 mark, which isn't a bad effort for three blokes. What made it even better was that the majority of the fish landed were over 40cm.

Old Man Creek 3-3-2011

Finally after all this rain the creek I thought the creek might have cleared enough for some lure fishing. I had spent the previous couple of days on the phone to various Government departments ascertaining whether or not people could legally fish from Beavers Weir. After originally being told that it was  illigal, it actually turns out that there is no actual fishing restrictions imposed by the DPI. State Water have a sign erected at one of the four entrances, but after speaking to the people in charge of legalities for State Water, they informed me that "it would be a very sad world if you couldn't sit on a lump of concrete in the middle of nowhere and throw in a line"... permission granted.

I can understand why there probably should be restrictions in place but when it comes to catch and release fishing, I don't see how it really matters. People talk of roe    re-obsorbtion in spwaning fish during the fight, however by using suitable gear (heavy-ish line/rod) you can end the fight quickly and return the fish all within one minute, and thats with a couple of photos. I believe it only becomes a problem when you find these 'meat fishermen' taking their bag limits everytime they fish, only to have them frozen and forgotten in the bottom of their freezers for two years until they are thrown out. I guess this is where the problem lies, how do you allow one person to fish from an area and not another. Perhaps a ban on fishing weirs altogether, or maybe something along the lines of no taking of fish from a weir area, but still being able to fish. Both would be tough rules to enforce! It is food for thought, but in the meantime I will continue to responibly fish at my local weir, because currently it is well within my rights.

Anyhow thats my rant for the week.

I managed to pick up 7 fish yesterday, 5 Murray Cod and 2 Golden Perch. The Murray Cod were all over 50cm with the biggest coming in at 59cm. I also had a decent fish on that felt bigger than all I caught but I applied a bit to much pressure and the hooks pulled. I would say it would have been a legal fish, but may have just been foul hooked.

The Goldens came in at 35cm & 46cm and both fought very well for their size. All came from eaither side of the fast water.

I also managed to lose my favourite lure, which I will replace this afternoon.

Water was clearing so by Sunday the place should be looking really good.

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.

Old man Creek 14-01-2011 & 18-01-2011

Went out to the creek on the 14th to have a big scout around down stream in the Hobies.
I was a little disappointed when I arrived at the weir to find that the water had stopped flowing over the wall. My thoughts were that now we would have to work allot harder for our fish instead of having them gifted to us by the running water.. haha. Needless to say Kanck hooked up to a Trout Cod within minutes of arriving at the weir, he lost the fish but it gave our confidence a boost. But after about 3 hours and a few kilometres downstream later we lost a lot of hope. It was interesting to have a look downstream but the fishing was not exciting for me, Kanck managed 2 Golden's and a Murray Cod for the day and I ended mine still stuck on a doughnut! We both agreed that there is very little need to venture to far downstream, because the few kilometers around the weir are productive enough!


Even small cod will take large profiled lures



I left the creek that afternoon very disappointed about the water level and as such didn't head out at all over the weekend.

I was lying in bed at 5.30am on the 18th and couldn't decide whether it was worth getting up to go for a fish, a few elbows in the ribs from the other half after I snoozed my alarm 4 or 5 times was enough to wake me up and motivate me to head out.



Another 42cm on this puppy and I'll be allot happier



I had a huge confidence boost when I arrived to see water plummeting over the weir again, things were looking good! My first three cast were met with semi aggressive strikes but I just couldn't hook up. Eventually the hooks stuck on a well conditioned 45cm Trout Cod on a 70ml AC. I changed lures not long after this due to a crack in the bib. I tied on a small Purple and gold Hammerhead and 30 odd casts later and I was on to a thumping 58cm Murray.... Good decision to come out! 

PB 60cm Golden Perch

There was a nice piece of water at the edge of the weir that looked like it just had to produce fish, there was a log in the water and a nice little back current on the edge of it. As I ran my small Hammerhead through a few times it was demolished by biggish fish, I called it for a 45-55cm Trout Cod, but to my surprise it turned out to be a 60cm Golden Perch in great condition. What was even more surprising was the quality of the fight in this fish. Golden's aren't known for their fighting prowess but this one performed very well in the fast water! This was a PB Golden for me and at 60cm is a credable fish, even compared to impoundment standards!....Very good decision to come out!

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I called an end to this session after this fish as I was happy to end it on such a good note. I'll probably head back out this afternoon, because apparently the water only started  coming back over the weir late last night. I think by this afternoon a few more fish may have caught wind of this and it may be back to what it was like last week!