Open the stretch you plan to fish for a starting point, a fly box and an approach. Check the current fishing boundaries and rules for your chosen spot before setting out.

Where to start. Begin in the cold, clear snowmelt water above the Tantangara storage, where the river is gravel pockets and bedrock gorges and the fish are wild brown and rainbow trout.

When. The practical window is late October to December, after the melt drops into its typical range. April and May offer a quieter second shot; in summer, fish early while the water is cool and leave warm trout water alone.

What to carry. A dry-dropper covers the broken pocket water: a Stimulator or Royal Wulff over a tungsten Hare’s Ear or Pheasant Tail. Carry a parachute Adams for flat glides and a Klinkhammer for wary browns.

How to fish it. Cover ground on foot, fish the seams and soft edges behind boulders, keep your approach low and make the first cast count. In clear water, the first cast to a pocket is usually the only one that matters.

Conditions and rules. Read the Tantangara chart as upper-river context, then check the nearest station and the Yaouk temperature before you drive. Check the current rules for the exact place.

Where to start. Choose a named stretch around Cooma, Michelago or the Canberra gorges. The water can be trout-oriented or native-oriented in this middle country: the Numeralla joins near Cooma, and the river crosses the ACT and New South Wales more than once.

When. The upper-river snowmelt sets the broad shape here, but conditions vary by named water. From late October the water is generally clearer and more readable; hoppers come off the tussock banks from Christmas. Read the nearest station before committing to a trip.

What to carry. For a trout-oriented stretch, bring the dry-dropper and pocket-water box from the high-country card, with a hopper tight to the grassy edge when the tableland banks turn to tussock. If the current water and rules put you in native-fish water, use the lowland card’s structure setup instead.

How to fish it. Match the water: read pocket seams and approach low for trout, or work timber and pauses for natives. Move on rather than showing a wary fish repeated casts in clear water.

Conditions and rules. Find your stretch on the ACT fishing guide’s map and check its current rules before choosing trout or native-fish gear. Use the station nearest your water. The Tantangara chart describes the upper river; it cannot tell you the conditions in every Monaro or ACT stretch.

Where to start. Below Burrinjuck the river turns slow and muddy across the plains. Look for fallen timber, undercut banks, standing snags and the outside of bends where Murray cod and golden perch hold.

When. Warm water from November to April is the lowland window. First light, last light and warm overcast days are worth more than a perfect bright noon.

What to carry. Bring a nine or ten weight, a leader heavy enough to turn a fish from cover, big flies for cod and a smaller fly fished deeper for golden perch.

How to fish it. Land the fly against the timber, not a metre off it. Expect the eat on the pause, strip-strike and turn the fish away from the snag immediately. For a following golden perch, stop the fly dead rather than speeding it up.

Conditions and rules. Read a station nearest the lowland stretch you will fish. The Tantangara chart describes the upper river and cannot stand in for conditions on the plains. Check the current cod season and other rules before you fish.

The mapped main river channel runs sixteen hundred and sixty-five kilometres and falls from fifteen hundred and fifty metres to fifty. Almost all of that fall happens early. The river rises in the Kosciuszko high country, runs through Yaouk and Adaminaby country, the Cooma and Michelago reaches and the ACT gorges, then reaches the Burrinjuck storage at around three hundred and seventy kilometres. From there the profile flattens through Gundagai and Wagga, then across the plains to Balranald and the Murray.

The bank survey from space reads the same story in a different language. The upper four hundred kilometres are open woodland with a third of the corridor in native grass, which is the Monaro tableland and the ACT hills. Between four and six hundred kilometres cultivation takes half the corridor, which is the irrigation country. Below that the river runs through open woodland again for a thousand kilometres, with dense timber only in patches.

Eight tributaries feed in off the Monaro, the Numeralla among them, joining near Cooma and running warmer and flashier than the main river channel it enters.

Up high, brown trout and rainbow trout are on record from backpack electrofishing through the 1990s to the 2020s. They are wild fish in the alpine reaches. Below the high country the department’s stocking summaries record rainbow trout, golden perch and Murray cod released in recent seasons.

Down low, Murray cod is the headline. Basin monitoring between 2015 and 2023 measured more than a thousand individuals, spread right through the size classes to the sixty-five-centimetre bracket and beyond. Golden perch show a similar spread out to the fifty-centimetre classes. Macquarie perch and trout cod are also on record and deserve care rather than targeting; silver perch appear in small numbers. Carp are the most-captured fish in the whole record.

What the trout eat is what the high country offers: caddis and mayfly in the pocket water, and from Christmas the grasshoppers off the tussock wherever the banks turn to grass across the Monaro. The cod and perch eat whatever swims past the snag.

The Tantangara record is an upper-river calendar, not a basin-wide forecast. The melt lifts that water from June and holds it high and cold through October, peaking in August and September at ten to twenty times the March low. It drops through October and November into a long, low, clear summer and bottoms out in February and March. The Yaouk temperature record peaks around twenty-one degrees Celsius in midsummer, which is why the upper-river card keeps its summer guidance tied to the water in front of you.

For the lowland and the middle river, use the trip section above and the station nearest the water you will fish. Do not carry the upper-river chart down to the plains.

The approach and retrieve belong to the trip you chose above: pocket-water discipline for trout and close structure work for natives. Keep those jobs separate when you change water; the Murray cod page carries the full rundown on rods, lines and flies.

The mapped river line is a drainage network, not a right of way. Much of this river runs through freehold country and a stream on a map says nothing about whether you may stand in it. The named access section below draws from NSW angler-access and public boat-ramp records from the high country to the plains, and links to the complete authority lists. It tells you which sites were inspected; none is a promise about the gate today. In the ACT the river corridor is largely reserve, with its own rules about where you may fish.

Up high, the August and September melt puts the river at ten to twenty times its summer level in country cold enough to matter if you go in, and the alpine weather turns fast. Down low the hazard is soft banks, deep holes, snags and heat. The river crosses the ACT and New South Wales border repeatedly, and which rules apply depends on exactly where you are standing.

Check the current rules for the specific reach and the jurisdiction before you fish. NSW trout limits are keyed to a classification, artificial fly and lure water, spawning stream or general trout water, and the season, size and bag differ under each. Check the current classification for the specific reach before relying on a trout limit or season; this page does not state one here. The seasons are set by moveable long weekends rather than fixed dates, which is one more reason to read the current NSW freshwater synopsis or the current ACT fishing rules before settling your plans.

Murray cod, trout cod, Macquarie perch and silver perch each carry their own protections, including a closed season for cod, and for the threatened species those protections are strict. Confirm them for your reach and for the state or territory you are standing in.