Lake Jindabyne NSW
By Fisho writer Pat Brennan

I have just returned from a few days up at Lake Jindabyne. We spent several days trolling, bait fishing and a morning in the Thredbo River. For our entire trip, conditions were clear, calm and sunny. Overnight lows were into the low minuses and day highs were low teens. We exclusively fished the Kalkite end of the lake. The lake is very low (around 40% I think) but there are no problems launching at Kalkite.

The bait fishing was reasonably slow and really only produced any sort of action after the sun had gone down. The majority of the fish caught were very good quality rainbows in the 1 -1.2kg class and all in superb condition. Most also fell to bright yellow Powerbait. However, there were no really frantic sessions, just a fish here and there. We didn't do any bait fishing in the mornings and only a little during the day which produced nothing.

Trolling was also quite slow, especially during the middle of the day. Each of the boats in our group caught fish here and there but with no consistent pattern. Some fish came on leadcore while others on flatlines. We caught fish on yellow wing Tassie Devils on both leadcore and flatlining, flatlined flouro green Tassie Devils, brown trout Rapala 7cm on leadcore only and flatlined yellow flatfish. There was little consistency. However, we did notice that most of the action came very early in the morning and as a result we headed out earlier each day. On our final morning we were on the water trolling at 545am whilst it was still dark. This proved to be quite a good move. We caught 3 very good quality rainbows in 15 minutes while it was dark and had t land them in torchlight and another two before the sun cleared the horizon. The other boats who ventured out after us all experienced the mediocre successes of the previous outings.

We also went for a fly fish in the Thredbo river. We found the river in pretty good flow and good numbers of fish too. However, they appear to have been fished pretty hard and were quite skittish. Faster runs produced a better chance of a strike. The standard glo bug and trailing nymph was the rig we used We saw some pretty good quality fish to about 3 kilos with the majority being around a kilo or so.