Well, down here in Australia, summer is slowly coming to an end, although the gods at the calendar companies have afforded us one more day in February this year. With the fishing being as good as it has been in recent week, who wouldn’t want one more day? The hoppers have been out in force this season, having started to appear in the fields a little earlier than I was expecting, so there were good numbers and in good sizes about as the weather heated up. Plus, the latter part of summer has seen some excellent willow grub fishing in the backwaters that just cannot be ignored.

It’s that time of the season when there are plenty of options on the larger rivers with edge feeders going mad for foam hoppers and backwater browns hitting the grubs pretty hard when they are feeding. This makes for some very exciting and also very frustrating fishing at times. But, with the recent run of hot weather and the very evident lack of rain, we are starting to see the very early signs of the change of season already. Most notably, this week I started to see a lot more falling from the willows than just grubs. With the wind up for a few days, the drier leaves from the willows were also starting to hit the water, signalling the coming to an end for willow grubs in coming weeks. No leaves for them to feed on means no grubs, so there is only limited time left for throwing around little green foam tubes. With rivers like the Goulburn running high due to irrigation needs, this is a great opportunity to get some edge fishing in and around the backwaters while they are holding fish and while that wonderful food source is still about.

As for the smaller streams, it has been pretty tough going for a lot of the systems in Victoria with the lack of rain. I’ve heard from numerous folk in Tasmania that their situation is following suit, although the Apple Ilse’s situation has been worsened by bushfires throughout the summer. In Victoria, most areas have been lucky enough to have gone relatively unscathed from fires this summer, although the lack of water in the streams is not entirely healthy. Three days back I ventured into a remote section of old Secret Creek for the entire day and was both delighted and horrified by the conditions. Delighted by the clear water and plentiful insect activity, but horrified by the low water levels that was seeing more fish congregated in the pools as many of the runs that usually held fish were altogether too low. This meant the fish were very spooky and often not able to be tempted with warmer water temperatures putting them off feeding. There are numerous feeder rivulets that flow into this system from all over the mountains on either side. These are usually a cause for concern early in the season as they carry runoff from snow-melt and usually dirty up the water downstream, but this week I found all but one in the 4 km section of water I covered to be dry. Here’s hoping we get some good rain soon, and in the areas that actually need it the most.

That said, as the season starts to change and we bid farewell to hoppers and grubs and low water, we are starting to look ahead towards Autumn fishing when a more hatch based targeting of fish makes for some wonderful fly fishing indeed. And we all know what follows then… spawn.