Fly fishing the Blue Mountains

Most of the region is national park, Blue Mountains and Kanangra-Boyd in the south and Wollemi to the north. The rivers fall a long way in a short distance. The Kowmung drops about eight hundred metres over its eighty-six kilometres, and the Grose is reported to fall around 950 metres in 54. Satellite cover along both corridors reads as forest nearly the whole way, which keeps the water shaded and the fishing pressure low, and leaves very little room for a backcast.

The western rim is different. Around Lithgow and Wallerawang the country opens into farmland and power-station land, the Coxs runs between paddocks, and the lakes sit beside the highway. That rim is where the Blue Mountains border the Central Tablelands, and the difference is in which way the water goes. Everything on this page drains east, to Sydney’s storage or the Hawkesbury. The Oberon and Bathurst streams over the rise drain west into the Macquarie and the Lachlan, and they are a farmland trout trip of a different kind.

The Lithgow lakes are the easy fishing. Lake Wallace, beside the highway at Wallerawang, is a weedy trout dam kept near full by pumping from Lyell; rainbows are the usual fish, with browns among them, and local fly anglers fish the shallows when a hatch is on. Lake Lyell has a recreation park with a ramp, and NSW records releases of brown trout, rainbow trout and Australian bass into it. In the upper mountains, Wentworth Falls Lake is a small town dam, built in 1878 to water steam trains and about six metres at its deepest, with stocked browns and the fly fishing at its shallow western end.

The Coxs River ties the region together. It is cut by the two Lithgow dams into an upper, a middle and a lower river. The middle river, below the Lyell wall, is trout water you reach from four roadside points, from the McKanes Falls Road bridge down to Sandy Hook. The small River Lett joins it at Glenroy after running through the Hartley Valley; it has long been stocked with rainbows and often runs discoloured. Below the Little River junction the Coxs drops into forested gorge and becomes walk-in water all the way to Burragorang.

The trout gorges come in from the south and west. The Tuglow and the Hollanders are small headwaters off the Boyd plateau that meet near Tuglow Caves to form the Kowmung; the Tuglow is stocked with rainbows, and the Hollanders is said to hold plenty of small browns and rainbows. The Kowmung runs on as a long, empty gorge to the Coxs. The Jenolan is a freestone stream reached from the Megalong Valley, where rainbows stocked in 1899 to draw visitors to the Jenolan Caves now breed alongside wild browns.

The bass gorges are on the eastern and northern side. The Grose runs from near Mount Victoria to the Hawkesbury-Nepean near Agnes Banks. The Colo forms where the Wolgan and Capertee meet north of Lithgow and cuts through Wollemi to the Hawkesbury, with its only road access on the lower river off the Putty Road.

For a first day, fish the Coxs below Lake Lyell in late spring, and finish on the bank at Lake Wallace in the evening. A dry-dropper covers the river pools, and Wallace wants something light: an emerger or an unweighted nymph cast to a moving fish along the weed.

For bass, start at Yarramundi Bridge on the lower Grose on a warm evening and fish a big dry tight to the shaded bank into dark. It is the only easy access on that river, and it is often the best of it in spring and early summer.

Leave the gorges until you know you like walking. The Kowmung is a long walk in from the Kanangra side, the Gingra and Uni Rover trails both given as around twenty kilometres. The Jenolan is a full day each way with river crossing after river crossing. Neither is a place to learn the region.

Late spring is the roadside window on the Coxs: the pools are full and the fish have not seen a fly for months. Summer moves the trout fishing to the edges of the day and the shaded water, with grasshoppers off the paddock banks below Lyell and beetles and ants dropping out of the gorge canopy. It is also bass season on the Grose and the Colo, where the dusk hour and the day after a rain rise are the times to be there.

Winter belongs to the run. Rainbows that have grown in Lake Burragorang push up into the Coxs gorge below the Little River junction through July, August and September, and from late winter they filter into the Jenolan, best behind a cold front that lifts the flow. Fish small bead-head nymphs and egg patterns through the runs. Reaching them means walking into the gorge.

Every one of these gorges rises quickly after rain. A crossing that was ankle deep going in can be unsafe coming out; watch the forecast for the tops, not for Sydney.

Seasons, closures, limits and licence requirements change; check NSW DPIRD’s current freshwater fishing rules and closures before you fish.

The lower Coxs and the Kowmung run toward Lake Burragorang, a WaterNSW drinking-water storage. Thompsons Creek Dam near Wallerawang is on private land and is covered with the Central Tablelands waters. A line on the map is not access permission. In the parks, check track conditions before you drive out; on the farmed Coxs and the Lett, use the named reserves and bridges, obey gates and signs, and treat every fence as a boundary.