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I can't help but fear that something has gone wrong with both Lake Eucumbene and Lake Jindabyne. My Winter and Summer 2012 reports spoke of better than average fishing in both lakes. The highlights in Eucumbene were in that period running up to Christmas 2012 when large numbers of browns and smaller numbers of rainbows were being regularly caught. In fact we were catching what the Australian cricket team would regard as respectable "cricket scores" of browns and averaging about one rainbow to each of the browns. There was different but equally encouraging feelings for Jindabyne with abnormally high numbers of iconic brook trout being caught through the 2012 winter and then a better than average start to the polaroiding season.

We should never be surprised when our fishing expectations are dashed because after all it's called "fishing" not "catching". What I am getting at here is that as the season on both lakes progressed it became increasingly patchy and whilst there were individual days with reasonable catches, by in large, the common thread on both lakes were very hard fishing.

As the season finished and we headed into the spawning season I got the feeling that whilst there were plenty of fish being caught a highlight of the spawn run fishing for me was the lack of rainbows. Whilst there is a dominant strain of Rainbows that spawn late in the season there is also second strain that spawns early in the spawn run. On top of that there is also generally quite a few predatory rainbows in the river eating dislodged eggs from both browns and early spawning rainbows. The numbers of those two groups of rainbows certainly seemed to be down. After the spawn run was finished reports from NSW Fisheries were that it was a normal spawn run ... I am not sure they were right.

It will be interesting to see how the 2013/14 season pans out.

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