Electric-blue adults over the weed in the afternoon, and under them a nymph the colour of the weed itself, swimming for the shore. The trout wait at the edge.
What you see
Blue and olive adults over lake margins; fish boiling along weed edges and swirling at something you cannot see
When
Through the warmer months on the Snowy Mountains lakes, from late spring; the migrations peak in summer
Tie on
An olive damsel nymph in 12 to 16 on a floating or intermediate line, retrieved slowly along the weed
Stand at the weedy end of a Snowy Mountains lake on a warm afternoon and watch the water a rod length out. Damselflies, blue and slender, are hovering and dipping over the weed. What you cannot see is the nymph beneath them, an olive, three-tailed creature a couple of centimetres long swimming with a slow wriggle toward the shore to climb a stem and hatch. What you can see, if you wait, is the swirl of a trout that intercepted one on the way.
Damsels are a useful summer food on Australian lakes. In Lake Eucumbene, expect them alongside caddis and terrestrials through the warmer months, with opportunistic takes possible through autumn and winter as well. NSW DPIRD’s Snowy Mountains guide names damsels among the regular warm-weather hatches on the lakes. They matter because a damsel nymph is a mouthful compared with a midge, it moves, and it moves toward the bank, which brings the fish in to where you can reach them.
The fishing is a nymph fished slowly along the weed edge on a floating or slow-sinking line, and the whole art is in the retrieve. Too fast and it is a lure. Too slow and it is a stick. A steady, unhurried draw with a pause in it, the fly swimming parallel to the shore where the real ones swim, is what a following fish wants to see.
What they are
Damselflies are the smaller, slimmer relatives of the dragonfly. The adult holds its wings folded back along the body at rest, the dragonfly holds them out flat, and that is the field mark. The nymph is long and thin, olive to brown, with three leaf-like gills at the tail that it uses to swim with a side-to-side wriggle. It lives a year or more in the weed of a lake margin before climbing out on a stem, a reed or a fallen branch to hatch into the adult.
The nymph is what the trout eat, and the migration to the shore in summer is when they eat it hardest. The adult is taken occasionally when it dips to the water or is blown onto it, but a fish rising to blue adults is a rarer sight than a fish swirling under them.
When and where
The warmer months, and the weed. On the Snowy Mountains lakes the damsel is a late-spring to autumn food, with summer the peak, and on the Tasmanian highland lakes the Inland Fisheries Service lists damsel patterns among the wet flies that work there. Look for the shallow, weedy bays and margins, particularly where a flooded shoreline has grown weed or drowned vegetation gives the nymphs something to climb. A day with a warm breeze putting a light chop on the water is better than a flat calm; the fish move more freely and the fly looks more alive.
The clue that they are on is the character of the rise: a bulge or a swirl a foot under the surface rather than a sip on it, along the weed edge, with adults in the air above. Fish that are following something and turning away at the last moment are often on damsels.
How to fish it
An olive damsel nymph in size 12 to 16, lightly weighted or unweighted, on a floating line and a long leader, or on an intermediate if the weed sits deeper. Cast along the weed edge rather than out over open water, let the fly sink a count or two, then retrieve with slow, steady pulls of twenty to thirty centimetres and a pause between them. Vary it until a fish tells you the pace. The take is often a slow, heavy draw rather than a snatch; keep the rod low and lift into it rather than striking.
A small olive
Woolly Bugger with the hackle trimmed short is a fair damsel nymph, and on the days the fish are covering water rather than holding on the weed a
loch-style drift with a damsel on the point covers a lot of shoreline. In the first and last light of a summer day, when the
mudeyes are moving as well, fish the bigger fly then and the damsel through the middle of the day.