Kowmung River

The Kowmung begins where the Tuglow and the Hollanders come off the Boyd plateau, nine hundred metres up, and for its first sixteen kilometres it is a confined bedrock gorge dropping hard. The fall of the river below shows that first pitch clearly. Then the walls stay but the bed changes: from about the sixteen-kilometre mark to the Coxs the river runs on gravel between confined banks, with the occasional small flat, and the drop eases steadily until the last ten kilometres are close to level.

Above Morong Creek is the top: the Tuglow, the Hollanders and Morong Creek country, short and steep, the stretch the trout classification is written for.

Morong Creek to the Coxs is the gorge, and it is most of the river. Cedar Ford is the one place the river is measured.

The bank survey tells you what to pack. Satellite cover along the whole corridor reads as mostly dense forest with open woodland, and no cleared ground to speak of. The top ten kilometres are more open woodland, which is why the headwaters have a little more light in them, and the bottom of the gorge is the darkest water on the river. In our read, that shade is worth an hour of afternoon fishing on a day that would shut down the open tablelands to the west.

Wild, and mostly unrecorded. No stocking is on record here, and the only survey record for the river is a single river blackfish. The department classifies the headwaters as general trout water, which suggests what the authority expects to find there without counting anything. In our experience brown trout are the fish the Blue Mountains gorges are known for, and a river this shaded and remote is where they persist. Treat the whole river as unproven rather than empty.

In our read, what they eat comes off the trees. In a closed-canopy gorge the terrestrials matter more than the hatches: beetles, ants, the odd cicada from late spring, dropping out of the overhang. Expect the gravel runs to carry caddis and a nymph’s worth of larvae under the stones, and the evening riffle is the reliable hour.

This is a rain-fed gorge, not a snowmelt river, and the calendar below is our read of it rather than a gauge’s. As on any rain-fed gorge, treat the confined sections as off limits after a decent fall in the country above Kanangra, and give it a few dry days to drop back into something you can read from the bank. Check the forecast for the plateau, not for Sydney, and check the Cedar Ford readings on the gorge page before you commit to the walk.

From late spring to the first frosts the river is, to our mind, at its best: settled, clear and warm enough for the terrestrials. Autumn is the quiet prime. Winter is cold, short and wet underfoot, and the headwaters fall under the trout season rules in any case; check the current synopsis for the dates.

Pack for a walk first and a river second. A four or five weight that breaks down small, a floating line, and a box that does one job well. The dry-dropper is the rig for the whole river: a dry you can see in broken light, a Stimulator or a Royal Wulff, with a tungsten Hare’s Ear or Pheasant Tail two feet under it. Fish every pocket once, as if it holds a fish, because in water nobody fishes it probably does, and move on. The first drift is the one that counts. In the evening runs an Elk Hair Caddis on its own. When the river is carrying colour after rain, a small Woolly Bugger swung through the deeper slots is the honest fly.

Casting room is the constraint. Roll casts, bow-and-arrow casts into pockets under the timber, a short leader you can control.

Everything is national park and almost all of it is on foot. Fire trails off Kanangra Walls Road and the Boyd plateau reach the headwaters. Into the gorge the walks are long: the Gingra Trail off the Kanangra tops and the Uni Rover Trail are both given by local fishing writers as around twenty kilometres from the Kanangra side. A pin on the access map is a route that reaches the river, not a promise about its condition today.

The lowest water runs toward Sydney’s drinking-water storage. Check with WaterNSW before you plan a trip that far down.

This is remote gorge country. As in any bedrock gorge, treat wet rock as slick and a fall as a long way from help. Carry what you would need to look after an injured person overnight, leave your plan with someone, and give yourself the daylight to walk back out. If the forecast is wet, do not go in.

NSW DPIRD classifies the Kowmung as a general trout water upstream of, and including, Morong Creek. That classification brings the NSW trout season and the general-trout-water bag and size limits with it, and it is stated on the headwater stretch. Below the Morong Creek junction the classification does not apply, and the ordinary NSW freshwater rules do.

The dates and the numbers move. Check the current NSW freshwater synopsis and the trout closure notification before you go.