The Dry Fly Season in Tasmania

It has arrived. It’s happening. We wait patiently for it, in great anticipation, and finally it starts. Of course it depends where you choose to fish, but for someone like myself whose business is based in Tasmania’s Central Highlands, I expect to see fish coming to the surface and feeding on insects from around the second week in November.

Sure, we’ll see exceptions to this rule. I saw rising fish on Little Pine Lagoon in August. I caught fish on dry flies on Lake Kay in late September, but it’s only now, in early December, that the rising fish are a feature of my daily fishing experience.

I know I go on about Herne Lodge and the fishing that happens there, but it seems to offer its own little encyclopedia of fly fishing experiences. And the experience there can potentially be replicated at other lakes in the Central Highlands.

While the range of aquatic insects that show up at this time of the year is vast, there are three that provide more than enough to focus on as a fly fisher, and which can test your fly fishing skills (and patience).

Insect 1 - the “midge” or the chironomid. As a fly fisher, I know these as an early morning insect. Still mornings on Herne Lodge from late spring see massive hatches of little black, white-winged midges. Thousands of them hover above the water and, when they run out of steam, form of layer of clearly tasty morsels on the water’s surface. The fish get so switched on to the midges that, rather than rising to individual insects, they stay at the surface, swimming with their mouths open, scooping up the insects just like a front end loader might do. “Smutting” fish come into the shallowest areas of the lake and around the weeds and gorge themselves.

It’s a great spectacle that gets the heart pumping, but it can also be some of the most challenging dry fly fishing you can face. These midges are tiny and, while they are not so hard to imitate when it comes to tying flies, your tiny imitation has to somehow become one of “the” midges that a fish will include in its midge feast.

It’s a process that requires many many casts, many spooked fish, many refusals, many curses and great patience. The most important element of the challenge is your cast. You need to able to get your very small fly attached to a very fine leader right in front of a feeding fish. Dry fly fishing often tolerates a fly landing within a metre of a rise. In midge fishing your ambition is 10 cm, and directly in front of the fish.

Persistence and finesse will often pay off, and, on Herne, that will often mean a spectacular fight in 15cm of water. If it doesn’t pay off there is a second alternative, and that is to forget imitating the midge and put a different fly on. Something bigger, probably black or brown, that could resemble an insect that a trout is not surprised to see in its natural environment. I generally go for a small black emerger pattern, sometimes with a flash of white in the post or as a wing. This is working on the principle that the occasional fish will be sufficiently greedy, and foolish, to take the alternative. But, once again, the idea is to land the fly as close to the fish’s mouth as possible, to give the fish the shortest possible time to think about it.

Insect 2 - the “mayfly” - or Ephemeroptera.. The mayfly is the foundation of dry fly fishing in the Central Highlands. When the “duns” are on, we’re happy, because the fish are happy too.

A mayfly. Source: pestworld.org

The mayflies have crazy lives. After hatching from eggs underwater they live as nymphs underwater for as long as a year, slowly growing to a point where they are ready to adopt the first of their two winged forms. When water temperatures get warm enough the nymphs will make their way to the surface of the lake and start their first metamorphosis. We say the “emerge” - they arrive at the surface, push aside their shuck, their wings pop out and they sit patiently on the surface of the water waiting for their wings to be ready to carry them off the water. We refer to mayflies in this form as “duns”.

This is a period in which they are very, very vulnerable. Trout might not have very big brains, but they know that a mayfly that has just emerged is there for the eating. And that’s what they’ll do. So as fishermen we wait for the mayflies to “pop”, we tie on our emerger patterns and we start offering our flies to the fish that are clearly switched on to eating the natural mayflies.

Ideally you start with the “smart” trout. These are the guys who understand that the mayflies are going to emerge in the shallowest water around the edges, where the water warms to the right temperature first. Once you have exhausted the trout hanging in the shallows, then you can move out to the more patient fish that are waiting for the insects to come to them.

At the same time as you get focussed on the emerging mayflies, as a good fly fisherman you also need to have your eye out for the mayfly in its second winged form. The initial mayfly form only remains in its form for a matter of hours before it metamorphoses again, this time into the “adult” form, that is responsible for reproduction. These guys we refer to as “spinners’ and they like to hover around the edge of the lake, preridically landing or dapping onto the water to lay their eggs.

Different mayfly genuses produce different coloured spinners. On Herne they are orange, as they are on some of the other local lakes. But you should also expect to see black spinner and, particularly on some of the lowland rivers, red spinners.

Insect 3 - the damsel fly or the zygoptera provides yet another fishing highlight. As with all insect-based feeding, this one has its own peculiar challenge. You will know that fish are feeding on damsel flies and dragon flies when you see fish leaping full bodied out of the water. The damsels are big enough to be seen on the wing and the fish are clever enough (sometimes) to take the insects in mid air.

Blue Damsel

For the fisherman, this provides an almost impossible challenge - the notion of a fly that can hover 20cm above the water is a thing of science fiction, or perhaps of the future. In the meantime, the best we can do is put a fly ON the water that resembles a damsel fly and try to give it some sort of movement that might trigger a fish to respond. The movement is generally a twitch - to give the sense of a fallen but still live insect - or a drift on the wind, which again suggests an element of normal movement.

At Herne Lodge, and on many of the lakes of the Central Highlands, these are three insects that are set to entertain fly fishers. If you want to give it a go remember to get in touch and book a day with me.