South Esk River

The South Esk is the longest river in Tasmania, and it fishes like three rivers laid end to end. From Upper Esk in the north-east it runs two hundred and sixty-five kilometres to the kanamaluka / River Tamar at Launceston, and it falls into three sections that any angler would recognise on the ground. From Upper Esk to Evercreech Road it is wadeable riffles and shallow pools through forest, plantation and pasture, small fit browns and the odd rainbow, the fly angler’s headwater. From Fingal to Conara it slows through open pasture into a mix of wadeable runs and broadwaters, where the mayfly hatches and grasshopper falls are more reliable and the shore angler has room. From Clarendon to Hadspen it is a lowland river you fish from the bank, in waders or from a kayak, with red spinners and caenids in spring and summer and hoppers and black spinners in autumn. IFS manages the whole of it as a wild fishery sustained by natural spawning; browns dominate, and nothing has been stocked. Two gauges sit on it, Llewellyn and Perth, and the Perth record since 1956 is the river’s year drawn on this page: high and cold from June to September, eight times the summer flow in August, then a long low summer. Check the flows before leaving home, because rain in the upper catchment changes the river fast, and that is the first thing this page lets you do.