In the week after Christmas, my brother Mark and I managed a trip away to the upper Murray system. After two wet years the ‘big’ rivers such as the Indi and the mighty Murray itself were flowing strongly, with plenty of trout and plenty of hatches – especially a mad half hour each evening when the Coloburiscoides duns poured off. It was what might be described as glamour flyfishing: long casts on sweeping, clear water with trout of a pound to many times that size taking nymphs and dries.
Following a few days on the big water, it was interesting and challenging to revisit a favourite creek, a creek never more than two rod lengths wide. Here, we found plenty of fish rising and some very nice ones too. Yet they were uncommonly hard to fool for supposedly naïve trout in a little stream. Then Mark accidentally snagged a willow just above a pair of rising fish. As he tugged to free the fly, tiny plops fell like raindrops from the branch and the fish went berserk, swooping all over the pool to take…of course, willow grubs! I slapped my forehead at my negligence in overlooking the obvious.
Immediately we swapped to willow grub flies and the response of the fish changed, just like that. Is there a better moment in flyfishing than when you categorically solve the riddle and a frustrating day instantly transforms to a bonanza? We crept upstream like assassins, biding our time as we waited for fish to show – and in the lee of each willow, they inevitably did. We caught 2 pounders we sighted first, and I even managed a 3 pounder that swiped at a dragging willow grub first cast, and then confidently took it on a good drift the second.
Eventually we reached the end of the beat, half an hour later than we planned. Had anyone overheard me and Mark as we skipped back to the car, they might have assumed they were listening to the excited babble of two novices who’d just discovered the joy of flyfishing. And they would have been half right.
