Team Tuesday - Making the Most of Bad Weather
Trout guru Alex Green from The Fishing Connection in Hobart shared a few words with us from his most recent adventures in search of frog feeders in Tasmania...
"On the weekend fellow work mate Andrew and myself ventured to the highlands to attend this years Great Lake Tie In for work. Unable to visit the highlands without wetting a line, we decided to stay an extra night and hopefully head west to go polaroiding the following day. Unfortunately we woke to a howling 20 + knot breeze, heavy rain and thick dense fog making our plans of polaroiding all but impossible. After a quick chat about what we should do, we decided our best plan of attack was to head out in search of frog feeders.
The plan was very simple, find the frogs and find a spot with the wind blowing over our casting shoulder to make casting at distance in the wind a lot easier. When we arrived at our chosen location the water was fairly discoloured from the wind and the fog was doing a good job of blocking out the sun so we decided to shorten our leaders to 9ft and upped our tippet to 4x Trout Hunter fluorocarbon to help cope with the wind. Our normal choices of frog imitations (Hamills Killers, Mrs Simpsons etc.) were all too light and wind resistant to cast with ease in the conditions, so we went down in fly size to smaller flies in my favourite frog colours. Olive with a splash of orange and little to no flash added. We opted for flies with small brass beads to help turn the flies over in the wind while still allowing us to fish very shallow without fouling up.
We planned to get out into the lake and to fish back in towards the shore. We could hear the frogs croaking along using short sharp strips to imitate a fleeing frog. The plan worked well and it wasn’t long before we had the first fish in the net. The poor visibility from the horrific conditions meant these often easily spooked fish were happy to venture into the open to chase down the fly. They were so aggressive and so switched on to not letting their prey get away, they were completely oblivious to us being there, at one instance we pulled three fish in three casts from the same hole in the bank.
Although it wasn’t the dream blue sky polaroiding day we had planned for, it shows getting some good wet weather gear and getting out there can result in a truly memorable session."
If you want to learn more about these frog feeders or fly fishing throughout Tasmania, drop into Spot On, The Fishing Connection and say G'day to Alex, Andrew, Steve and the lads. You won't be disappointed!
