While I love nothing more than a multi-day backcountry mission, sometimes you have to work with what you have got.
Family commitments, work and sporting activities can all-but rule out wilderness fly fishing sometimes, so you make the best of what you’ve got.
And with the more remote lakes not firing, today we fished a lake that sits in the centre of the regional town of Ballarat. While you have to watch the joggers and walkers with your back cast, this particular lake holds a huge number of trout and is renowned for its mayfly hatches.
There were only a few fish sighted during a quiet morning with no sign of the much sought-after duns. We swapped details on the fishing with a few anglers, one of whom told us that there was a decent spinner fall the day before in the afternoon.
We took a quick break to have a sandwich and as we returned to the water, sure enough spinners had begun to accumulate above the water and the trout wasted no time in switching on to one of their favorite forms of food.
Within a few casts I hooked and landed this two-pound brown and another smaller fish that took a dun pattern I was using with the red spinner as a sighter.
As the number of naturals began to increase, the fishing got harder with the fish favoring the real spinners hovering just above the water over our articificial imitations.
Still we finished the day with four fish to the net, all browns. It really is electrifying fishing with fish charging around the lake chasing these spinners even if they are hard to tempt.
