Wet weather, boom gates and a positive outlook for spring

The boom gate at Tasmania’s Lake Augusta.

Trout season closures are the slowest three months for the whole year. The daylight hours are short, but that’s about it. All too frequently the trout season races to a close in April but the weather and fishing conditions still look excellent into May: alas our favourite places are then out of bounds, for fishing at least.

June and July are simply dreary—a few salmon on the saltwater fly if you can be motivated enough on those big high pressure system blue sky days.

Winter, for me at least, is mostly occupied with tying flies, reading books and watching weather patterns. Tasmanian fly fishers are almost universal in our desire for there to be as many wet days in the highlands as possible during the closed season. The key dividend is full to flooding lakes to the west of the boom gate and healthy flowing rivers in the rest of the state. An added bonus is rising Hydro lakes: always better than falling levels.

I’m not sure about other tragics, but spare moments are consumed by watching weather pattern predictions. The perennial hope is these low pressure weather systems will dump loads of water on the catchment for the western lakes, but also monitoring my favourite Hydro lakes’ levels to see if there is any joy in terms of lakes getting to their prime levels—and staying there for as long as possible.

There seems to be as many weather apps as there are lakes in Tasmania—once upon a time the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was supreme for weather watchers but now is a poor shadow of its former self. I pay for access to two main apps, Windy.com and Windy.app – best used through an iPhone or iPad. Despite the same names, if not the extensions, they are different developers and present different information.

I probably prefer Windy.app, as over time it tends to be the most accurate and has other good information embedded in it, such as tides, wind, and if you are into such things, the solunar predictor for fishing activity. It is relatively simple to save favourite locations, which makes it a little easier for decision making. Before the internet, I’m sure we were all far more adaptable to the conditions. Now I just check Windy.app and go where the weather suits what I want to do.

The third great time waster, or saviour from tedium such as Teams meetings that could have been an email, are the web cams on the plateau. I’m sure there are plenty of us who look at the Lake Augusta web cam while in some interminable online meeting and think about what would be happening at their ‘secret’ lagoon shore to the west of that scarred landscape.

Which leads to the other great blight on the highlands landscape. The boom gate at Lake Augusta Dam. Once upon a time it was open as soon as the season commenced on the first Saturday closest to the 1st of August. That was a time when access was controlled by the Lands Department rather than the combination of Inland Fisheries Service and Parks and Wildlife. Practical people kept the road in good condition and open. Now it is unlocked around the first week in October—I’m not sure that conditions and the road are any different in the month or so before that…

While it is only mid-June and we have another six weeks till the season opens and another 14 weeks till the boom gate probably opens, the prospects for a good spring are already looking decent. As of the second week in June, we’ve had a lot of soaking rain, which will fill those wild lakes and lagoons and spark life into those ephemeral drainages that allow trophy lakes to maybe get a few new recruits. It will of course also allow another successful spawning season for the brown trout.

Excepting the miracle of all miracles and the gate is unlocked in parallel with the season opening, the only way to access the Nineteen Lagoons past the boom gate is either on foot, or by mountain bike. One colleague has a trailer for his mountain bike, which allows him to drag all manner of gear with him. It’s a bit fiddly getting under the boom gate, but once past that and fully assembled, he’s off to the races and can cover a lot of ground very quickly. No cars coming the other way either.

Those of us in their fifth decade and longer will remember the Trout Fish Tasmania promotional videos. While there was a lot of delicious footage in there, some of the most memorable was of Rob Sloane and the late Val Del walloping a bunch of big trout in shallow water on a very dirty day. If I remember correctly, that was in September. They would have driven almost to the edge of that lagoon…