The little Otways creek.
I opened this fishing season, if not my account, on a very small creek out the back of Lorne in the Otways on Victoria’s southwest coast. It was a creek that I wouldn’t have thought was home to any trout, had I not seen one there in mid-winter on a family walk to a waterfall upstream.
I’d been out that way in previous summers and had walked by dry creek beds, which is often all the information you need when considering fishing them at other times. The path we walked to the waterfall followed the mostly overgrown creek, and in a small section where the creek opened to the path, we went down to have a look. The water bubbled out of a little riffle and flowed smoothly over a rock shelf. My youngest daughter Maddy waded into the shallow flow in her gumboots. A few stomps in the water later, a ‘pan-sized’ brown trout swam from the cover of a submerged branch in maybe five centimetres of water, and then upstream into the riffle. It was a surprising and interesting development.
Return to the creek
We didn’t see any more trout, but one was enough for me, so I returned in early September to catch it after the river season opened. As you’d expect, the creek was still very small (under a metre across in most places), but waving a fly rod above it made it seem smaller still. The riparian vegetation was even denser than I remembered.
Despite the confines, I got some nice casts and drifts in with my dry-dropper rig, and struck a few times when the dry dipped under, but this only served to tangle my line into the tree branches above and beyond me as it sailed free of the water each time.
I fished the riffle adjacent to where Maddy had spooked the trout in July, and another little run above it, but didn’t see anything.
Putting aside the disappointment of not being able to round out the winter spotting with a spring catching, I pushed onto the larger creeks that flow into the ocean under the Great Ocean Road between Lorne and Apollo Bay.
Something larger.
There were two other cars in the car park of a favourite creek when I arrived late in the afternoon; someone was fishing the bottom pool, and someone else had been fishing upstream. Like bears coming out of hibernation, or southern right whales and their calves cruising the coast in winter, the changing rhythm of the season was sending the Homo sapiens flyfishers to the water. There was a rising trout or two, but I was third in the queue so set off to a smaller creek back up the road.
Flows were good, fish were scarce, but I caught a small (some would say very small), silver brown trout from under a road bridge, although not before I spooked a large black eel.
A fifteen-year seasonal rhythm
In the last 15 years I have generally opened the season with a fish in the Otways in September, and except in the warmest years (which can herald bushfires a few months later), it tends to be too early and too cold, and I leave feeling the fish aren’t in the rivers – or the ones that are present, are small and hard to catch (possibly more a reflection of the fisher and the techniques being used than the number and quality of fish in the river). I follow up with visits in October and November depending on all the usual things (which can mostly be filed under weather and time).
While the calendar marks the days and rivers provide some allegory for the passing of time, internally I need to observe seasonal milestones for the year to feel that it is passing as it should.
As the days lengthen, and the air sweetens with the scent of blossom in late October and early November, the need for some decent fishing forms in me like a plant that needs to bloom.
While temperature, sunlight and rainfall all signal to the trees and bushes the time is right to flower, I must catch some trout to feel that a certain time of year has arrived, and so far this season, it hadn’t quite been happening.
On a family trip to the Mansfield area in early October, I cast to a rising fish for 15 minutes on the Jamieson River, right in town. I was changing flies and lengthening tippet when a lure fisher worked downstream through the same water and spooked the fish.
A big Jamieson River in October.
A few weeks later, I was upstream on the Howqua, dodging decaying deer carcasses felled by hunters and picked over by wild dogs. I was casting with no confidence in cold clear flows. I didn’t get a fish before being rained out; I’d been thirsty but was glad I hadn't taken a drink from the stream.
In mid-November on a family trip with friends to Warburton, I fished again for 15-20 minutes on a section of the Yarra River in front of our campsite. This year the river was higher than usual (this was the third year we’ve made the trip at this time in spring) and clearing after recent rain. I managed to have a quick cast in the water in front of our campsite before the usual disturbances of swimmers, kayakers and other fishers made it unappealing.
It was hard to see into the tannin water, but I’m sure it was a nice trout which inspected the dry and took the nymph. However, I missed the strike. I left Warburton, as I did the Jamieson and Howqua, fishless, with the emotions associated with the trout season still in bud but more than ready to progress.
Return to the Otways
So I had to get back to the Otways, and a couple of weeks ago, I did. The smell in the air where I live in Ocean Grove, roughly an hours’ drive north-east, had changed; the sweetness of spring flowers was missing, replaced by the odour associated with dewfall on curing grass, another subconscious signal that the river fishing season was in full swing.
On the drive down, the rivers were brown and discolouring the ocean when they met. Persistent easterly winds and moist airflows had brought rain to the ranges in the preceding days, and the streams were up because of it.
I got to a favourite creek, where last year in early December I had fished in the evening, dodging platypus and cormorants, but getting fish to hand as the infradian rhythm of my year demanded.
This year I was a week or so earlier and the water, as per the other streams I crossed on the way, was high and slightly discoloured.
Fresh footprints in the mud suggested I was the second arrival for the day, but I had to fish, so I worked the stream as methodically as if I was the only one to be on the water since the river began to flow.
I fished a dry-dropper rig as usual and got a lovely little brown trout early, which was reassuring, and then around a few more bends and maybe an hour later, another. The fish were nothing to write home about size wise, maybe 20 centimetres or so, but they were fun to catch and bright, appearing almost jewelled in the dull light of the mist still rolling in from the sea.
Bright trout, dark water.
Another hour later, after battling poor drifts in fast-flowing pocket water, I found a more stable run and lost a trout a bit bigger than those I’d caught to that point. I felt the weight, saw the writhing violence of it as it began to fight… and then the hook came free.
Three for three
Further upstream again, in softer water in a longer pool, I hooked three in three casts; each progressively a little bigger. The last one, the largest, I lost as I drew it towards me.
Three fish in three casts had me subconsciously feeling I’d stumbled into a miraculous, infinite cycle of catching. I would be forever on that Otways stream, lost to family and friends as I drifted the fly and caught fish until the sun’s light faded forever.
However, on the next cast I hooked a tree branch hanging over the water and the brief spell was broken.
I saw a trout rise in riffly water at the head of the pool, but didn’t catch it, and despite a variegated and wondrous array of insect life doing its thing above the stream for all the time I fished, that was the only real surface action I’d seen.
I fished around more bends and boulders and fallen trees, but no more touches.
Return to the ocean
It was getting late in the day, and I like to give those bottom pools a try in the evening, so I made my way back downstream to do just that. On my first trips in my late 20s, I’d bound back downstream across the rocks with abandon – and disregard for the permutations of the streambed on the way. But 15-plus years later in a discoloured flow, my progress was more laboured, slipping and sliding on rocks I couldn't see.
Then, while distracted by a beautiful blue robin feasting on insects coming off the water, I slipped forward, driving my knee into a sharp rock on the stream bed. It hurt a lot, and was one of those moments where you can briefly wonder if you’ve done yourself enough mischief to be stuck in an Otway valley until someone realises you should have been home a few hours ago.
Thankfully the pain subsided; perhaps those boyish emotions I feel when catching a fish reminded me that I had jarred knees before, and the pain usually subsides when you move again. I made it to the bottom pool where, out of the shelter of the valley, the strong southeasterly was still blowing.
It’s one of the great features of these Otway streams that you can catch a trout with the ocean mere metres away. From that cobbled shore in the wind, I cast on the rippled surface of the deep pool and watched my dry fly bob around, lending a nice action to the nymph beneath it. The dry went down and another lovely little brown trout fought as the river ran to the sea, while the easterly rollers in the ocean ran towards it.
Edge of the ocean.
I missed a bigger one (or at least it felt bigger) in calmer water around a slight bend; immediately afterwards I heard a big splash near the ocean shore, and looked back to see a cormorant had landed. It started diving and possibly threatened the fish I’d caught, before deciding against getting any nearer to me and flying off again. There was a duck sleeping on a rock in the next section. I thought it’d spook the water if I disturbed it, so I decided to let sleeping ducks lie, and give the fish, the water and myself a rest too.
The ocean and the Otways were still misty on the drive back, but the sun occasionally broke through as it set, briefly lighting the clouds, surf and hills. On the south-facing slopes, there were bushes in flower, the white blooms catching the half-light. The rhythm of the seasons seemed just right, and it felt for now at least, like a beat to which I was keeping time.
Hamish Brooks' new book Upstream in a Dream is available here and through good book stores.
