Numeralla River

A hundred and fifteen kilometres of mainstem falling from eleven hundred and forty metres to just over seven hundred where it meets the Murrumbidgee, and the fall is front-loaded. The fall of the river on this page shows a steep confined pitch between about nine and twenty kilometres from the source, bedrock gorge dropping hard, and then a long, gentle tableland profile of sand-bed floodplain for the rest of its length: riffle, run and long slow pool, the classic Monaro shape. That middle and lower river is what you fish. It is small enough to cross, readable, and it responds to rain within hours. Two gauges sit on it, one at Numeralla School at about eighty kilometres and one at Chakola near the bottom, and the Chakola station is the one drawn on this page.

The bank survey from space says treeless. Native grass covers more than two-fifths of the whole corridor, open woodland a third, and dense timber less than one per cent. From the sixty-kilometre mark to the junction the bank is two-thirds grass, which is the plain proper. There is no shade you did not bring, the wind has nothing to break it, and a fish in a pool can see you from a long way off.

Brown trout are the fish the Monaro streams are known for, and rainbow trout with them. NSW DPIRD’s stocking summaries record both released into the river in each recent season, and the stocking timeline is drawn on this page. The survey record bound to the river is almost empty: seven fish from backpack electrofishing in the 2010s, six goldfish and one mountain galaxias, the small native that is a good sign for water quality on a tableland stream. That is a picture of how little anyone has surveyed it, not of what lives here. Treat the river as trout water that nobody has counted, and let what you find tell you.

What they eat is what a treeless plain offers: grasshoppers off the tussock from Christmas until the frosts, in numbers that make a hopper the daytime fly, beetles and ants under the banks, small mayfly on the glassy pools, and caddis in the riffles between them.

Read the river’s year on this page, and read the temperature line as closely as the flow. The typical flow is nearly flat all year, somewhere between half a cubic metre and a cubic metre and a half a second in every month, and that flatness is misleading. The spread around it is enormous. On the driest tenth of days the river drops to a few hundredths of a cubic metre, a chain of pools with a trickle between them; on the wettest tenth it runs at five to fifteen. Check the dot on the chart before you drive, not the calendar.

The temperature makes the season. Water above twenty-one degrees through December, January and February, passing twenty-four in the warm quarter of summer weeks, is water to leave alone. From April through to early November the river runs between about six and seventeen degrees. Mid-April to late May, with low readable flows and fish that have fed all summer, is the pick. September into early November, with the pools full and the water climbing, is second. The cold months between fish slowly and the trout season is closed on classified waters through them in any case.

In midsummer, drive an hour west to colder alpine water and come back here in April. A hand in the river cannot tell you whether it is safe to stress a trout, and one old gauge reading is no better.

Approach is the whole game. Fish upstream, move slowly, spend more time looking than casting, and keep your shadow and your rod flash off the water. Wind is a constant on the plain; learn to use it rather than fight it, and carry a leader long enough to keep the fly line off slow, glassy water. A four or five weight, a floating line, and a twelve-foot leader tapering to fine tippet.

A parachute Adams in the size of the mayfly on the water, or a Klinkhammer for the fish that boil under the film and will not take a fully dressed dry. A hopper tight under the tussock bank through the afternoon from Christmas on. When nothing is showing, a slim Pheasant Tail under a small dry as a dry-dropper, drifted along the undercut, or a Hare’s Ear fished deep through the head of a pool. The first cast to a lie is the one that counts; the second is for the fish that did not see the first.

The mapped river line is a drainage network, not a right of way. The Monaro is largely freehold grazing country and much of this river runs through private land. NSW DPIRD’s inspected angler access sites along the river are listed further down this page; an inspected site is not a right to cross a paddock. Confirm the landholder and the road before you go, and a gate and a fence are the answer to any question about where you may walk.

The hazard here is not depth but speed of change. A flashy tableland stream can rise hard while you are on it after rain upstream that you never saw. If the water is coloured or rising, get out. In summer the hazard is the water temperature, for the fish more than for you.

Check the current NSW rules for this river before you fish. NSW trout limits depend on how a water is classified, artificial fly and lure stream, trout spawning stream or general trout water, and the season, minimum size and bag differ under each. No water-specific classification has been confirmed here, so take the limit and season from the current synopsis. The seasons are set by moveable long weekends rather than fixed dates, so read the current NSW freshwater synopsis and the trout closure notification rather than a remembered date.