Fly fishing Tumut and the South West Slopes

Follow the Tumut downhill and you have most of the region. Up top, below the Round Mountain trailhead, it is a grassy valley of deep pools and shallow riffles. Near Sue City a road crosses it by five bridges. Then come the scheme storages: Talbingo Reservoir at the town of Talbingo, Jounama Pondage near the same town, and Blowering Reservoir, a big clear dam that sits partly inside Kosciuszko National Park. Below Blowering’s wall the Tumut River becomes a large tailwater, carrying summer irrigation releases on its way to the Murrumbidgee.

Blowering is low enough to hold a strong native fishery and high enough to get cool, clear snowmelt. Visibility reaches about five metres, and that clarity is what makes sight fishing for cod worth the trip.

The creeks hang off that spine. The Goobarragandra River, Gilmore Creek and Adjungbilly Creek run into the Tumut. Adelong Creek and Tarcutta Creek go straight to the Murrumbidgee, and Bago Creek feeds the Tarcutta. North-east, the Goodradigbee River runs down to the backed-up water of Lake Burrinjuck, with Micalong Creek coming into it on the way. Burrinjuck is where the Murrumbidgee, Goodradigbee and Yass meet behind one wall, an irrigation storage that still supplies the farms around Griffith and Leeton. It rises and falls with that job, so an edge you fished last year can be dry or drowned this year.

To the south, Tumbarumba Creek and Mannus Lake sit in the Snowy Valleys country off Jingellic Road. Mannus Lake has a campground at the water.

The Tumut is the reason most fly anglers come. Because it runs on dam releases it stays cold through a hot summer, and it keeps fishing for trout through a hot NSW summer. In the middle water around the bridges rainbows make up most of the catch, richly spotted and dark backed, with browns in the mix and most fish 8 to 14 inches. Mid-summer to early autumn is hopper time. A foam hopper with a tungsten nymph under it, fished as a dry-dropper through the riffles and slowed down over the deep slots, is the standard rig. Flow decides the day. At full release only a few stretches can be fished on foot, though flooded paddocks then hold big cruising fish. As the river drops, the hidden timber and slots show and the fish in them can be stalked by sight. Below Blowering, access is limited and the wading unpredictable, so a drift boat is the better tool.

The creeks are smaller and simpler. Most are stocked: browns and rainbows in the Goobarragandra, Adjungbilly, Micalong, Bago and Tumbarumba, browns every recent season in the Adelong, rainbows in the Goodradigbee, where the browns do not appear in the stocking ledger at all. Tarcutta Creek has rainbow trout with redfin and river blackfish on record, and Gilmore Creek is a blackfish water with no trout in its records. Fish them upstream with a Royal Wulff over a bead-head Pheasant Tail, and swap to a hopper wherever grass meets the water in summer.

The dams are a different trip again. Blowering is a cod water fished by looking, with a boat if you can get one: cruise the margins quietly, find a fish sitting still, and put a big fly well ahead of it. Locals call it Lake Disappointment for the hours it can take, and say the fish are worth them. Burrinjuck is cod first too, with golden perch the easier fish and rainbow trout the cool-weather option, and it fishes best treated as one arm at a time rather than the whole dam. Talbingo and Jounama are stocked trout stillwaters, fished off a windward bank or loch-style from a drifting boat. Mannus Lake is a camp-and-fish water whose stocking records list rainbows, cod and golden perch.

For a first trip, go to the middle Tumut in summer and fish between the second and fourth bridges, moving by road until you find fish. If it is winter, go to Jounama Pondage and walk the bank with the wind in your face. If you have a boat and patience, spend a warm day looking for cod in Blowering’s shallows. For a quieter river day, pick an access site on the Goodradigbee and fish upstream with a dry and a nymph.

Spring opens with cooler water on the Tumut: smaller flies for fish feeding on olives, nymphs fished deeper, and a Kosciusko Dun, the pattern said to bring on the best dry fly fishing outside summer. It is also when the golden perch crowd arrives on Blowering and Burrinjuck, and a quiet weekday is worth having. Summer is the Tumut’s best surface fishing and the time cod show in Blowering’s clear shallows; on the small creeks, fish early and late. Autumn brings the Kosciusko Dun back to the Tumut and the browns get busier on the creeks. In winter the stocked trout dams carry on, and Burrinjuck’s rainbows cruise the shallower margins while the water is cold.

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

Parts of the upper valley are national park, and the creeks cross private land in places. A line on the map is not access permission: the access sites on each water’s card are places people reach the water, not a right to cross land, so follow gates and signs. Lower down the river, the Murray and the Riverina page picks up the lowland native water the Tumut and the Murrumbidgee run into.