Midges

Still morning, a lake like glass, and a line of rings moving up a wind lane. The insects are too small to see from where you stand. The fish are not.

What you see

Rings and head-and-tail rises in a wind lane on a calm morning; a haze of tiny insects over the water

When

Spring into summer on the Snowy Mountains lakes; November and December mornings on the Tasmanian highland lakes

Tie on

A size 14 to 16 midge ball, a small buzzer or an unweighted nymph, fished slow or dead still

Get to the shore of a big highland lake before the sun is properly up on a still spring morning and you may see the best rise of your year, and it will be to an insect you can barely make out. Midges are the smallest thing a trout bothers with and, on the lakes, one of the things it bothers with most. Lake Eucumbene is known for it. So is the Dee Lagoon in Tasmania, where the midge hatches come off in mass on calm mornings and the fish line up in the wind lanes to eat them. The trout on both lakes lock onto midge when it is on, and they will ignore a bigger fly dragged past them while they do it.

The insect is a small, mosquito-like fly whose larva lives in the mud and weed of the lake bed, whose pupa swims up through the water to hang under the surface before it hatches, and whose adult sits on the film for a moment and then leaves. Trout eat all three, and the pupa most of all. The rise you see is fish taking the pupa in the film or the adult on it, and the head-and-tail rise moving steadily along a lane is the signature of a fish eating one after another.

The wind lane is the whole game. A light breeze pushes the hatching insects into slicks and lanes on the surface, and the fish follow the lanes. Find the lane, get ahead of the moving fish, and put a small fly in the water where the next rise is going to be. Then leave it alone.

What they are

Midges are the chironomids, the non-biting relatives of the mosquito, and they are in every lake and slow river in this guide. The larva, red or olive, lives in the silt. The pupa, the stage the fish eat hardest, rises to the surface and hangs there while the adult breaks out, and it is at that moment, trapped in the film, that a trout can pick them off in numbers without moving far. The adults you see hovering in a cloud over a bay in the evening are the same insects, spent.

They are small. A size 14 is a big midge and a 16 or 18 is closer to the mark, and on Tasmanian lakes and rivers the tiny caenid mayflies often hatch in the same calm hours and draw the same kind of sipping rise. You do not need to tell them apart. A small fly in the film, presented to the fish rather than the water, covers both.

When and where

Midges are regular lake food in the Snowy Mountains. On Lake Eucumbene, look for hatches in warm, calm conditions from spring into summer, with still mornings often best, especially after a spring rise that floods new ground. In Tasmania, the Inland Fisheries Service writes of mass midge hatches on the Dee Lagoon and of early-morning hatches through November and December on the highland lakes, with brown trout feeding on midge in the open water of a northern basin often just beyond the reach of a bank angler, which is why a boat or a kayak earns its place on those mornings.

Three conditions line up for a midge rise: calm, warmth and early light. A morning with a breath of breeze is better than dead flat because the breeze makes the lanes. By the time the wind gets up the rise is usually over. On the Eucumbene side of the Snowy Mountains and on the Central Highlands lakes, that means being on the water at first light in the warm half of the season and going home for breakfast.

How to fish it

Fish the rise, not the lake. Watch a lane long enough to see which way the fish are moving and how often they come up, then put the fly a metre or two ahead of the last rise and wait. NSW DPIRD’s guide lists a size 16 to 14 midge ball as a lake pattern for exactly this. A small Pheasant Tail fished unweighted just under the film, a red or black buzzer, or a Klinkhåmer in 16 or 18 hanging its body through the surface all do the job of a pupa stuck in the film. A tiny dry works when you can see fish taking adults off the top; the rest of the time the fly wants to be in the surface, not on it.

Retrieve slowly if at all. A figure-of-eight so slow you can hardly feel it keeps a small nymph just under the film and in touch. When fish are on midge, small nymphs and wet flies fished carefully are a better starting point than a big fly worked fast through the lane.

From a boat on a Tasmanian lake, the loch-style drift with a team of small wets covers a wind lane better than any bank cast. From the shore, walk the lane and cast along it, not across it. When the rise stops with the wind, change to a mudeye or a mayfly pattern and fish the rest of the day.