Harrietville March 2017

The weather was warm and stable for the 4 days, the river was at Summer height of 1.24 and I was keen to fish. I took a lot of trout over the  four days, 66 in total. Many of these were juvenile and keen to have a slash at anything that looked like food. The larger trout were very careful and much more selective and it took a while to work out what would constantly take a fish. I used a Glenn Innes hopper , elk hair caddis, yellow and red humpy and a couple of different Wulffs. Finally I started to get better fish on a green Humpy # 14 . that was a nice change because I tied it years ago but never sent it down the river. When I found some deeper water near Smoko I began with a larger red and yellow stimmy. My thoughts were that the larger fly might dissuade the little fish from having a crack. In a particularly nice gutter which ran at the rivers edge for 40 metres I took a beautiful brown trout of 43 cm. Great fish who'd been sitting at the food conveyer belt gobbling anything that came its way. I took some photos, put the tape measure on him and released him back to his home. Over the next few sessions i fished that water 3 more times and on one afternoon found a few more nice browns which were all over 35cm. The trailing Copper John worked well on those trout. We had a great trip to the North East and have another planned for April 22-25 with Denis, Glenn and Tony.