As a bloke that spends over 200 days per annum chasing marlin and tuna on Mother Ocean, you would think that fishing on days off would not be on. Our charter business Ross Hunter's gamefishingcharters is owned and run by my son Glenn and myself and whilst my passion is marlin fishing, a lttle trout fishing mid season is something I look forward to every year . My good friend Gordon Johnson and myself have been travelling to the Australian alps (about a 6 hour drive from Sydney)for in excess of 40 years to do battle with the cunning and at times illusive trout.
The area we fish is in the Snowy river scheme, a massive man made lake system . The lakes Eucumbine and Jindabyne both holding big rainbows and browns. These can be trolled of fished for from the shore with bait,lures or fly.
We chose to fish the streams. The mightyThredbo River holds brown trout to 18lb and rainbows to 6lb . There is a bag limit of one per day per angler in the river but in the lake it is much more lax.The river is one per day and it has to be over 50cm in length. Fisheries in NSW really do protect these fish. In June the big girls and boys head up to spawn, so we arrive just before the main run, before they get other things on their mind.
We walk and wade the pristine river banks and polariod the fish We use a weighted glow bugs and sometimes a weighted nymph underneath . The secret is to bounce the nymph off the bottom at all times, if this doesn't happen the fish will not bite . We use a no 5 rod and cast upstream and do not use indicators, this helps to get the flys deeper. The Thredbo is a superb river that runs quickly and like most Ozzie rivers has runs and then massive pools many of the pools are where the big fish spawn.
We fished in 30 to 40 knots of wind at time so much so that one had to time casts in between the gusts but the fish were snapping and the wind just wasn't an issue.Even the minus four degree celcius mornings did not phase us . It's funny how conditios and players comfort are just not an issue when the fish are biting. We both had a beaut four days and now it's back to work, back to the ocean where we are currently catching some great yellowfin ....more on that next report