Beetles and ants

A hot day, a breeze off the gums, and the lake margin under the trees dimpled with rises to something small and dark. This is the fishing the Tasmanian summer is built on.

What you see

Small dark or bronze beetles drifting on the film under the trees; sipping rises along a downwind shore; flying ants in a still evening

When

Warm days from December to April on the Tasmanian lakes; summer on the tableland and Blue Mountains waters

Tie on

A Red Tag in 12 to 14, a black foam beetle, or a small ant pattern, fished still on the film

There is a kind of summer day on a Tasmanian highland lake when nothing much is hatching from the water and the fish are rising anyway, steadily, along the shore the wind is blowing onto. Look at the surface under the trees and you will find it speckled with small bronze-green beetles, blown out of the gums and stuck on the film, kicking. This is a gum-beetle fall, and the Inland Fisheries Service writes about it the way other places write about their mayflies: huge falls on the Dee Lagoon, prolific falls from December to April on the highland lakes with browns and rainbows rising freely, good beetle falls along forested southern shores. A Tasmanian angler’s plain advice is that a Red Tag on a size 12 or 14 is the first choice of most anglers there unless the fish are obviously on something else.

It is not only Tasmania and not only gum beetles. On the Blue Mountains lakes and the tableland streams the guides fish brown beetles, Christmas beetles and pumpkin beetles through the warmer months, and ant patterns through the day when flying ants are about. The Snowy Mountains lakes fish well on beetles and cicadas in summer, and a still evening with a fall of winged ants on the water can bring up every fish in a bay. Terrestrials are the insects the water did not make, and in an Australian summer, with eucalypts to the waterline, there are more of them than of anything else.

The fishing is a small dark dry fly presented to a rising fish and left alone. Beetles do not skate, twitch or hatch. They fall, and they float, and the fish sip them. Match the size and the darkness, put the fly in the fish’s line, and do nothing.

What they are

Gum beetles are the scarab beetles of the eucalypts, bronze to green and about a centimetre long, that emerge from the forest in warm weather and get blown onto the water in numbers. Christmas beetles are their larger, showier cousins on the mainland. Pumpkin beetles, brown beetles and the jassids, the small leaf-hopping bugs of the tablelands, all end up on the water the same way. Ants are a separate event: the mating flights of winged ants on a humid, still day put thousands of insects on the surface at once, and trout key on them to the exclusion of everything else.

None of these insects can get off the water once they are on it. That is what makes them such reliable trout food and such an easy fly to fish: the natural is a passive, drifting, slightly sunk speck, and so is the imitation.

When and where

Warm days in the warm half of the year, and the downwind shore. In Tasmania the Inland Fisheries Service puts the beetle falls from late December through February and on some lakes as late as April, on days warm enough to bring the beetles out of the forest and with enough breeze to put them on the water. Forested shores are better than open ones. A bay with big gums to the waterline and the wind blowing off them is where the fall lands.

On the mainland the same rule holds through summer on the tableland lakes and rivers: beetles under the trees, ants on the still humid evenings, cicadas in the loud weeks. The fish are close to the bank, often in a foot or two of water, and on a bright day you will see them; see polaroiding for how to fish to a beetle feeder you can watch.

How to fish it

A Red Tag in 12 or 14, a black or bronze foam beetle in 12 to 16, or a small black ant in 14 to 18, on a floating line and a leader long enough to keep the line off the fish. Cast to a rising fish or ahead of a cruising one and let the fly sit. If it is refused, go smaller and darker before you go anywhere else; a beetle feeder taking size 16 naturals will look at a size 12 and turn away. A slightly sunk fly, in the film rather than on it, is often the one they want.

In a big fall, with fish rising everywhere, the temptation is to cast at all of them. Pick one. Watch it rise twice, work out where it is going, and put the fly there. A Chernobyl Ant is too big for a beetle fall but comes into its own on a windy shore when the fish are looking for anything large; carry both. When the grasshoppers start in late summer the same banks fish a hopper through the heat of the day and a beetle in the evening.