NANCY AND DOUGLAS GO FOR A WALK Shaun Cooper
T
o many fly fishing and hiking is an escape, from work and perhaps a busy home. The solitude is the major appeal for many like me and it has led to some lengthy trips into the central plateau in search of this. This all changed after the birth of our daughter Nancy, I couldn’t wait to share the area that I am so passionate about with my family. After the perhaps
Nancy - just hanging out with dad.
naive excitement of trekking around a favourite headwater with a baby on my back settled it was replaced with new parent anxiety and sheer fear. From the totally understandable concerns of what if I fall? Or a snake bite, to how do you even look after a baby?! So, I did what we all do these days, I consulted the invaluable resource which has replaced the need to pester people with experience, the internet.
You might not get much fishing done this way, but it is fun. Fishing News - Page 36
After finding a baby carrier second hand online we started practice on small creeks which is difficult when someone wants grab every willow branch that passes by. The next step was camping in the 19 lagoons to maximize the tiny window in which a 6-month-old is content between nappy changes, feeds and general tantrums. But with the popularity of the area around the Christmas period by the time we got up and going the whole lake had been fished twice. We were now on trip 3 with no success, the pressure was building. Eventually we realized the chance of landing the revered western lakes brown in a 45-minute window was slim at best so we began to relax and just enjoy spending time in a world class fishery with even better surrounds. With the pressure of results lifted it became clearer that the experience should be more about my family enjoying themselves rather than me catching fish, so I returned to an internet free reliable source of information that unsurprisingly took very little pestering to convince them to join me on some research missions, my old mate Mitch
www.tasfish.com - Get the knowledge - Get the fish.
aka “midge”. We spent a gloomy but successful afternoon fishing to tailing western lake browns with our vehicle still in sight! Something we take for granted in Tasmania that’s for sure. Buoyed by the success we had the day before on an old stomping ground of Mitch’s I went back with my wife Sarah and our now 8-month-old 10kg daughter/counterweight. It was a pretty standard January day on the plateau, not as warm as it was supposed to be and about twice as windy as predicted. We decided that the other side of the bay looked more sheltered so we planned to wade across the shallow sandy bay to a nice-looking tree where we would have lunch and then go home, maybe a practice cast or two. If there ever was an argument for the existence of fishing gods today was the day! Out of the corner of my eye through the chop I could see a nice brown working his way back out to the weed beds straight across us on a 45-degree angle facing away. We did our best imitation of a square dance routine as Sarah positioned herself on my left hand side while I shook like a
