Dam Rewarding — Craig Rist

Simon with a nice dam fish.

DAM REWARDING

Craig Rist

Even on the cloudiest of days, a walk along a man-made dam wall can produce surprising results. Although, when you think about it, maybe it’s not so surprising. A dam wall can provide both food and shelter, which is something that all trout want. It can also have a diverse food supply with terrestrials from the wall above and both aquatic and airborne insects accumulating against the wall on the wind.

The security of the deep water along many of these dam walls gives trout the confidence to swim right up high against the wall in search of food and then drop back down to the depth, often returning on the same beat to do it all again.

Viewing platform

An angler with a good pair of polarized sunglasses definitely has the upper hand on these walls. The extra vision you gain from the elevation on the top of a dam wall certainly makes it easy to spot fish. Even on those impossible sight-fishing days with that painful cloud reflection on the water, the height from the top of the dam brings sight fishing back into the game.

Because trout are often on a beat — especially brown trout, it pays to take your time walking a dam wall in search of fish. I like to stop every now and then to give them a chance to show them selves. Good places to just stop and look are those areas that look like they may have accumulated food in against the wall or when you find caddis or mayfly spinners flying close to the wall. Patches of weed beds or submerged timber are also worth spending some time just watching the water for a trout to materialize.

That subtle rise of a trout that delicately sips down an insect or the sight of the water surface moving in a different direction than the wind are things to watch out for. Then there will be those slashing rises that are easy to hear and see, they are the come and get me if you can rises.

The Catching

Once I have found a trout happily going about its daily routine, I like to take a few seconds to work out the best approach. I really don’t like casting from the top of the wall when a fish is facing me because it can easily see me against the skyline and spook off. I prefer to get down closer to the water to setup an ambush cast or get in behind a fish and present the leader and fly out to one side where they can sense the fly land, turn, see it and hopefully eat it.

An even better way to sight fish a wall is with two people working together, one to get into position to make the cast and the other staying up high to keep an eye on the fish and calling out its location. This is a fun way to catch fish. When you finally do catch one, it feels like you have both contributed to its capture.

Sight fishing with dry flies is a lot of fun and it’s a great way to catch these dam wall fish. I like to start with a size 10 foam stonefly caddis or size 14 or 12 CDC F-Fly and then change if I needed to match a hatch.

Blind searching with a wet or dry fly is another way to pull a fish from a dam wall. Sometimes they are just not swimming high at the time you find yourself fishing the wall. They may be resting under a rock or sunken timber waiting for that opportunistic feed. When it is cold and rough a streamer style fly can be worth a go. But I prefer blind searching with a dry fly on those warm days when insects have had the time to warm up and be on the move. I like foam flies that land with a loud splat. Flies like this will often pull fish up from the depths when nothing else is happening.

Favorite locations

I know I am defiantly not the only one who has walked along the top of the dam wall at Lake Mackenzie on the way in or on the way out of the Chudleigh Lakes and have seen trout cruising this concrete dam wall.

From a morning midge hatches to an afternoon smorgasbord of insects at this dam, it’s always worth a look. The wall is quite high so a long cast down the steep concrete wall is needed. Then once you have a fish hooked, you then have to walk the hooked fish to the rocky shore to land it. This makes a capture here very rewarding and a lot of fun. This wall can save the day when I have run out of opportunities on a long walk out west.

My other go to dam walls are at Lake Binney and Tungatinah Lagoon. These two walls provide a great opportunity for a sneaky fish, to break up the drive to or from Hobart. No waders required just a fly rod, reel, a few flies and your favorite polarized sunglasses and you are good to go.

I’ve certainly done this more than once and I can truly say that it has never let me down on a warm sunny day, I have always caught at least one fish walking these dams.

The Lake Binney dam wall has Bradys Lake Road along it and I am sure the cars that drive this section of the road send grass hoppers and other insects flying into the air and into the lake below, where these Lake Binney trout are waiting for a feed. Adult caddis are also common along this wall and trout can be seen taking these with a splashy rise. There is also plenty of fish holding structure along this dam, with submerged trees and weed beds close by giving these trout somewhere to live with a short swim to the wall for a feed.

An easily polaroided trout from the wall.

Ending a trip on the Binney dam wall.

Simon Hedditch and I had just finished fishing Wayatinah Lagoon with my boat. We had only caught a couple of fish the previous day so we decided to pack up early to fish Lake Binney on the way home. We launched the boat and spent the morning fishing the lake, adding a couple more fish to our tally. By lunchtime we had pulled the boat out and packed it up for the drive home. I just couldn’t drive past the wall without stopping to showing Simon the sight fishing possibilities at this wall.

We parked off the road on the Western side of the lake and made our way along the wall. There was quite a bit of cloud cover with a light Westerly wind blowing along the wall. The dam wall is a little over a kilometre long and we had already walked half its length without seeing a fish. I’m sure Simon must have been thinking I had rocks in my head but I was quietly confident we would get a shot by the time we reached the end of the wall.

Then when we were three quarters of the way across, there was our fish, happily cruising the edge in search of the odd caddis that was flying and landing on the water. I stayed high on the wall to keep an eye on the fish while Simon got into position and did his thing with the rod. This trout didn’t hesitate, rising with confidence to Simon’s small foam fly. Simon did the rest and was into another lively Binney brown trout.

It was my turn now and we didn’t have to walk far to find another trout eating caddis. This one was feeding hard in a small-localized area. I scrambled down the rock wall to the water’s edge and moved up onto the feeding fish. The cloud reflection at this level made it impossible to see into the water, so I relied on Simon to relay where the fish was and which direction it was swimming after the next rise. The fish took another caddis and was now swimming towards me. I made the cast ahead of the fish and waited. My fly wasn’t sitting there long when a snout chomped down over my fly. I set the hook and was rewarded with resistance we all love to feel when everything comes together. We went on to catch two more before calling it a day. Not a bad way to end a trip that was looking like it was going to be a little light on.