Snowy River

The upper river is alpine: confined bedrock headwater, short gravel floodplains, a gorge, and flat shelves where the water sits in the pondages and Lake Jindabyne. Below the Jindabyne wall the river drops onto the Monaro and eases: gravel floodplain and occasional confinement past Dalgety, then bedrock gorge that steepens toward Burnt Hut Crossing. Below it the river runs confined on sand and gravel toward Willis on the border, and the profile flattens out below McKillop Bridge across the Orbost floodplain to Jarrahmond, Orbost and the sea.

The bank survey from space walks the same line: woodland with some dense timber on the alpine river; open woodland and native grass, with almost no dense cover, through the Monaro and border country; then a switch to closed forest below McKillop Bridge; and finally cultivation across the Orbost flats. The Eucumbene has its own pages.

Brown trout and rainbow trout in the alpine and Monaro reaches, both in the survey record. The upper river’s fish are wild. The survey record below the border is a different cast: congolli, estuary perch, eels, flathead gudgeon, and the small fish of the Gippsland lowlands, which is a lowland river and an estuary being honest about themselves.

What the trout eat changes with the height. Caddis and mayfly in the alpine pocket water and the Monaro glides alike, evening for the caddis and daytime for the mayfly on the flatter water around Dalgety. From Christmas the grasshoppers off the tussock along the Monaro reaches, in numbers that make a hopper the afternoon fly.

Read the river’s year for the alpine river. Above Island Bend the melt peaks in October. From summer until the April frosts the pocket water between the pondages is, in our experience, small wild trout fishing at its best.

The Monaro river below Jindabyne runs to the dam’s calendar rather than the sky’s, and its gauges at Dalgety Weir and Burnt Hut Crossing read water temperature as well as flow. In summer, fish early, keep fish wet, and read the temperature under Conditions before you drive. In our experience spring and autumn are the pick down here.

The gorge and the estuary are other trips altogether.

On the alpine river, small-stream fishing: a four weight, a dry-dropper with a Royal Wulff or a Stimulator you can see in broken light over a tungsten Pheasant Tail, one cast per pocket and a step upstream. The fish are in the soft water beside the current and the tails of the plunge pools.

Below Jindabyne the river is broader and you cover water. Work the heads and tails of pools, the inside edge of bends and any current break that offers depth close to food, with a Hare’s Ear or a Woolly Bugger when it is pushing or carrying colour, and a parachute Adams or a hopper along the tussock banks when it is low and clear. If the river is pushing hard after a release, the useful water often shrinks to the edges, and that is where you fish.

Inside Kosciuszko the upper river is alpine country; as anywhere in the high country, carry gear for a change in the weather. Below Jindabyne the river crosses mixed Monaro grazing country and public land, and NSW DPIRD’s angler access points along the river are mapped; a point the authority has checked is not a right to cross a paddock. Dalgety is the town on the river.

Do not infer access from the mapped river line. Confirm land tenure, track conditions and current park alerts before setting out, and read the nearest gauge before wading a river whose flow a dam can change while the sky is clear.

The Snowy crosses New South Wales and Victoria, and the rules change at the border and with the water. 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. Take the limit and season from the current NSW freshwater synopsis and the trout closure notification for the NSW reaches, and from the current Victorian recreational fishing guide for the river below Willis.