Brown Trout from Tullaroop Reservoir

It's getting cold in these parts and that means one thing - lake fishing for trout is back on the agenda. The best shore based lake fishing occurs from early winter until about November when the water gets too warm and the trout stay down deep in the middle of the lake. Winter offers "smelting" trout action. The trout come in to shallow water during the day to devour bait fish and as you walk around the lake you may be lucky and see "bust ups" of bait fish which gives you a great target to cast to.

This month it was off to the trophy trout water Lake Tullaroop. We fished a few spots from midday onwards but it wasn't until the last hour of light that the fish came on the bite. I am not surprised by this, trout stay in deep water for protection until the light fades and then they come closer to shore to look for smelt and gudgeon. However as its get colder we may get some feeding action during daylight hours.

We tried a zillion lures but after Mad Dog caught a 1.1 kg fish on a twenty year old yellow celta style lure I began to suspect that it didn't matter what you were using. The key was to find feeding trout and that wasn't going to happen until the last hour of light. Just as we were ready to go home I saw a fin break the surface in the dimming light and cast right at it. I picked up my first and only fish just under 1 kg on a pink Tassie devil.

The two successful lures were so different from each other I suspect lure "realism" had nothing to do with our success. Plus a local we met caught trout on a lure that looked nothing like either of ours. The trout were pretty much taking anything, the hard part was finding feeing fish.

As we were packing up we talked to a few locals who said the fishing was going to get better over the next few months as the trout start to actively feed on smelt during the day. At these times you can see fish crashing through the water. I am looking forward to this style of fishing and intend to cover a lot of water looking for actively feeding fish rather than chucking lures in random directions and hoping.

Some lessons for today:

• We fished for six hours but the fish didn't come on the bite until the hour before sunset. Not only that I caught my fish about five minutes before we packed up. That's one fish each at about 1kg each (plus two tinny reddies that don't count) caught in the last hour of the day. You just can't give up when you are trout fishing and you have to be confident that you could catch fish at any time.
• Clearly last light (and probably first light) are best on this lake but with winter coming on expect to see smelting action throughout the day, particularly if its overcast.
• Lure choice can often make no differnece to your catch rate. I go through the ritual of changing lures every twenty minutes or so but on a day like this finding feeding fish was all you neeeded to do. Once you got a lure near them they'd smash anything. Unfortunately, this theory contradicts my other musings.
• I was thinking about bringing out the fly rod but had to ask myself why. The wind was blowing in our faces on the shore where we caught fish making casting really difficult. That means there would be less fly time in the water compared to lures using a spinning rod. And isn't a hard body or soft plastic just as tempting to a trout as a fly?
• In Fly Fishing Fundamentals Robert Sloane says when on a big lake for the first time you need to cover a lot of ground as the fish may be concentrated in a small area enmasse. Now the fish were only biting towards evening, so even if they were concentrated we wouldn't have known it until then. However, the three areas we checked out were very different from each other. The first was deep rocky territory, the second was lifeless silty mud and the third was rocky banks with extensive weed growth.  This looked to be the best as weed beds means growth which means food and cover for smaller fish and small fish mean big fish. So whenever you are on a big lake for the first time, make sure you walk around for a few k's to find the likely spots.