Galaxias and baitfish

When a trout leaves the insects alone and starts hunting, it is usually hunting these. A small, scaleless native fish, in shoals, along the rocks in spring. The largest trout in the lake are the ones that learned to eat them.

What you see

Showers of small fish spraying from the shallows; slashing, chasing rises with a wake behind them; trout along the rocks in spring

When

Spring, when the galaxias spawn on the rocky shores of the Tasmanian lakes; winter and early spring for smelt feeders; the whitebait runs in the estuaries in late winter and spring

Tie on

A small streamer or a slim baitfish pattern in 8 to 12, retrieved with pace along the rocks

Many trout waters in this country have a small native fish in them that was there first, and in many of those waters that fish is a galaxias. They are slim, scaleless, mottled little fish, a finger long, that shoal along the rocks and the weed, and they are the reason a lake grows trout of a size its insects could never explain. The Tasmanian Inland Fisheries Service writes of trout at Arthurs Lake chasing the galaxias that spawn on the rocky shores in spring, and names the saddled galaxias and the Arthurs paragalaxias as fish found nowhere else on earth but that lake and its neighbour. One highland lake owes the size of its trout to a prolific endemic golden galaxias that makes up most of what the trout eat. The Victorian Fisheries Authority’s species profiles have brown trout in the western district lakes preying mainly on the galaxias that are plentiful there, and NSW DPIRD lists galaxiids among the food that brings trout onto new ground when a Snowy Mountains lake rises.

On the coast the same story has a different name. Sea-run brown trout in Tasmania are ordinary browns that spend much of their lives at sea and come into the estuaries in late winter and spring to feed on the whitebait, the young of the galaxias and the other small native fishes that run upstream to spawn, and a good whitebait year is a good sea-trout year.

The fishing is a small streamer, retrieved with some urgency, to a fish that is hunting rather than sipping. It is the opposite of the delicate work. Find the rocks or the run, find the shower of fleeing baitfish or the slashing rise, and put a fly through it that looks like one of the shoal getting left behind.

What they are

The galaxiids are a family of small, scaleless freshwater fish of the southern hemisphere. A handful of species are common and widespread; many more, the paragalaxias of the Tasmanian highland lakes among them, are found in one or two waters only and are listed as threatened by the Tasmanian and Commonwealth governments. Great Lake alone holds two of these, alongside a suite of tiny shrimp-like crustaceans and a shrimp that survives from the age of the dinosaurs, and the Inland Fisheries Service manages the lake with all of them in mind. Smelt are a separate, silvery family that fill the same niche in many mainland impoundments. Whitebait is the name for the juvenile galaxias and their kin as they run up from the sea.

For the angler, these baitfish fill a similar role: a slim, pale, five-to-eight-centimetre fish that moves in shoals, and a trout that has switched to eating them.

When and where

Spring on the Tasmanian lakes, when the galaxias spawn along the rocky shores and the trout patrol the rocks after them. The Inland Fisheries Service points to blind casting around the rocky shores of Arthurs Lake in spring for exactly this. Winter and early spring for the smelt feeders and the post-spawn fish holding close to structure, with the western shore of Great Lake named in one guide for its smelt feeders. Late winter and spring in the estuaries, when the whitebait run and the sea trout follow them in.

The place is the edge with structure: rocky points and shores, the drop-off beside weed, a river mouth, a wind lane in open water where a shoal has been pushed up. A galaxias feeder shows itself. Look for the small fish spraying from the surface, the bow wave of a trout driving into a shoal, the slashing, wake-throwing rise that is nothing like an insect feeder’s sip.

How to fish it

A slim streamer in size 8 to 12: a small Woolly Bugger in olive, black or white, a Yeti or a fur fly in Tasmania, a small Matuka or a simple white-and-olive baitfish pattern with an eye. Fish it on a floating or intermediate line along the rocks and the weed edges, casting parallel to the shore or fanning across a point, and retrieve with quicker pulls than you would give a nymph, with the odd stop. A galaxias flees in short bursts; a fly that does the same draws the chase. The take is a hit. Strip-strike, then lift.

From a boat on a Tasmanian lake, a loch-style drift along a rocky shore in spring with a baitfish pattern on the point is the most efficient way to cover the water. In an estuary for sea trout, fish the run of the tide at the river mouth with a small white streamer and expect the fish to be where the whitebait are, which is often within a rod length of the bank.

Handle the small natives with care if you catch one on a nymph, and put it straight back. Some of these fish are rarer than any trout you will ever cast to, and the lake is theirs.