2017 08 24 wild brown trout on RapalaAfter having physio this morning and given the weather conditions were absolutely beautiful I headed off to small stream in the upper reaches of the Mersey River near Weegena.. This little river quite often fished well early season while there's good flow in it, I'm hoping it will do so this trip too. Once the water level drops it's a tough little stream to fish, so now is the time to give it a go. I started off using a small gold bladed #00 Aglia and had a follow in the first five casts. That brown came up and nudged the trebles with it's nose a few times before it turned and moved off. I knew then and there the spinners weren't going to work here today so changed over to a gold/black F-3 Rapala to see if that would get the result I was after. Well, I had only moved upstream some twenty meters when I was onto my first brown for the session. It was a well conditioned fish that went just on 350 grams, like 98% of the fish I catch it had it's photo taken and was soon back in the river.

The next three nice flowing narrow runs I managed another two browns from three hook ups with the best fish going 510 gms, then a little further on I lost two in a row. It went quiet over the following three hundred meters or so having just one hit and miss. Then in no time at all this little stream fired up and I caught and released four nice browns from six hook ups after covering around one hundred and fifty meters of water.. Some areas on this stream can't be fished as there's no way to get into it. Well there is if you want to get on hands and knees and crawl in, but at 71 years of age I'm over doing that. Not only that it's narrow, shallow and very heavily overgrown so one has to bypass similar sections like this on this little stream. I was pretty happy with how the fishing had gone so far and I decided to fish on until I caught one more trout, then I would call it a day. Catching that last trout took much longer than I thought it would have. It took me another forty five minutes before I finally picked up the eighth fish for the session that lasted close on three and a half hours. I did go close to catching that last fish a few times, but they were all hit and misses much to my disgust.

Overall it was a top day to be on a stream in such beautiful conditions and the trout helped to make it that much better.. Most of the fish today varied in sizes from 320grams up to510 gram and all in great condition. I did have four changes of lure throughout the session as well. The lures used today were the Mepps #00 gold Aglia, gold/black F-3Rapala, brown trout F-3 Rapala & lastly the Daiwa Yoguri ghost brown that caught the last trout of the day.

Adrian Webb

2017 08 24 wild brown trout

 

2017 08 24 wild brown trout on Rapala