The Eucumbene below the wall — a small tailwater dropping off the dam through timbered bedrock country, easing across Nimmo Plain, and drowning again in Lake Jindabyne. Different water, different rules, nobody about.
Drive from Adaminaby to Jindabyne and you cross the Eucumbene twice without noticing either time. Above the lake the river is famous. Below the wall it is a rumour: a small green river that falls off Eucumbene Dam into a valley so heavily timbered that from the road you would not know there was water in it. This is the trip for being left alone.
The stretch runs from the dam wall down to the Eucumbene arm of Lake Jindabyne. It drops off the dam steeply, settles into fifteen kilometres of confined bedrock channel through the most wooded country on the whole river, then opens across Nimmo Plain and eases toward the lake. It lives on what the dam lets through, which is usually not much, so the pools are small and the fishing is intimate rather than grand.
The fish are resident browns and rainbows at the size a small shaded river grows them. Nothing is stocked, nothing is surveyed and there is no gauge, so that is a guide’s read rather than a count. Take it as a reason to go. Unstocked, unsurveyed and unfished is the description of a river with wild fish in it.
It is a different river from the famous water in two ways that matter. The melt that keeps the run water high and cold until November goes into the lake, not into this river, so the tailwater can be in order on opening weekend while everyone else is waiting. And the fly-and-lure and spawning-stream listings that govern the river above the lake do not apply below the wall; no water-specific listing was found here, so treat it as a general trout stream and check the current NSW closure notice before you fish.
Fish the shaded water in spring and early summer with a short rod, a dry-dropper flicked into the white water at the head of each kitchen-sized pool, one drift, then move. From January the plain fishes like the rest of the Monaro, with a hopper from further back than feels reasonable. The ways in are around Nimmo Plain and off Pretty Pot Trail, through a mix of park and grazing land where a fence is a fence. After a storm on the Monaro the side creeks bring it up fast and dirty. Give it two dry days.