If fire fighters were gun fighters Delegate River would be Australia’s OK Corral.

Delegate River Tavern was the rallying point in early 2003, when fire fighters from around the world converged to contain the deadly firestorm which swept from north east Victoria into the Alpine Parks and border country of NSW, and then flared up to hit the outer suburbs of Canberra, where it claimed four lives.

Altogether almost a thousand fire fighters and their equipment were based at the Delegate River Tavern and camping ground. In addition to the dozen cabins and caravans, the place was like a 24-hour army boot camp, with 400 pup tents, three marquees and a fleet of semi-trailers, for catering, showers and toilets. The fire fighters left their souvenir jackets, autographed, hanging in the pub.

Volunteers included 20 United States’ smokejumpers, men and women who actually parachute INTO the path of wildfires, with their equipment, to cut firebreaks, a tradition established by US paratroopers during World War Two, when Japanese fire balloons were being dropped into West Coast forests.

By the time the fires ended in April 2003, two million hectares of Australia had been burned out. That’s an area bigger than Northern Ireland and around the same size as Slovenia or Israel.

So, in anyone’s terms, it was a bloody big fire.

We were there, in early summer, two years’ on, to fish for trout in the Delegate River, one of Australia’s blue ribboned Monaro trout streams.

Our problems however had nothing to do with drought or fire, or the rate of recovery of the river from the fires, – but months of persistent rain, which continued through worsening summer storms throughout our four-day visit, and re-taught us some valuable lessons about adapting to the environment and backing your judgement.

Our strategy had been to plan for hot days, dry flies, hatches and hoppers, shallow, clear water and casting with long fine leaders to spotted trout. Mother Nature made fools of us and we realised the importance of being flexible enough to adapt our approach to the local conditions, which often had the four seasons within the same 24-hour cycle.

Occasionally, the adapting took place from our cabin veranda, during the rainsqualls, from where we experienced the thrill of seeing a platypus casually feeding in the wild, or taking in the beauty of Australian wildflowers. Sometimes we’d pull out the small-scale maps and re-think the hot spots, trying to find part of the river with no run-off road dirt, or we’d pull out the fly vice and experiment with even darker nymphs and woolly buggers.

But usually, we just went to pub. To strategise, you understand.

The First Day

Our trip began with a 7 am Virgin flight from Brisbane. My mate had his smart new Sage four-piece packed in his bag, but my old four-piece Loomis had lost its battle with a dorado off Stradbroke Island, and had been replaced with a much longer two-piece. Not as fashionable, but it did mean that we got shuffled away from the long check in queue, by one of Richard Branson’s finest and re-assigned to the oversized baggage check in, behind only one couple with a baby seat.

So, even if you have a four piece, if you’re flying Virgin, pack it in an oversized case and do your best to wangle or pre-book an emergency exit row.

That was the upside of the flight. Unfortunately the Virgin CEO was on the same flight, and you would not believe how much one set of flight attendants can overact when trying to impress the boss. The jokes were so naff, that the emergency exit began to look tempting at times, even at 12,000 metres.

I had to go to Canberra for a meeting with Sports Minister Senator Rod Kemp, to talk over the implementation of his decision to adopt the final recommendation of my old Senate Drugs in Sport Committee and, I can now relate that, 15 years after the Senate report, we finally have an anti-drugs policy for sport, which should make our kids more reliant on their coach than their pharmacist. Well done Rod.

My fishing mate – by complete coincidence – had to do some Canberra lobbying at the same time, so a joint trip and four days at Delegate River afterwards seemed like a pretty logical thing to do, when we explained it to our respective partners.  Women can be so cynical.

We’d arranged with Europcar for a Falcon for the drive down, but the kid at their airport office, gave us a Magna instead. With a Magna’s turning circle, we had to start turning off to Bombala around Cooma, but it took us there in under three hours with little fuss … until the two hour mark, when some annoying little prat under the dash, presumably related to the man in the fridge who turns on the light, kept waking me up every five minutes to tell me I was tired and should have a break. I suppose I was driving at the time, so it was a fair cop.

When we arrived in Delegate River, it was early evening and cloudy, but no rain as yet. The bridge across the river is just before the tavern itself, and lies over what we call our “Pool of Confidence”, a long, tapered holding pool behind overhanding branches, an undercut bank, and a strong bubble line, which always contains a fish. The pool was up, but the water was still reasonably clear. We’d save it for tomorrow.

Delegate River Tavern has a country style pub, a dozen or so cabins, and a caravan park – along with a kilometre of so of excellent frontage onto the river itself, right on the New South Wales/Victoria border – so make sure you have fishing licenses for both states.

We’d booked Cabin Two, with an ensuite and the best view of the river. At the time of arrival, the pool right in front of the cabin contained a platypus feeding quietly in the gathering dusk. Not a bad look really, even for a pair of fly fishermen, who’d rather see evidence of trout rising. The real reason we liked Cabin Two has nothing to do with the view. It’s the only cabin with a floodlight overlooking the river and you can leave it on while you go to dinner and check out the insects when you get back, to assist with fly selection for the following day.

Dinner at the pub was excellent  – steak and real vegetables, open fireplaces, no poker machines, just a dart board, a pool table and a jukebox with seventies rock and blues from The Doors, ACDC, George Thorogood and the Destroyers … my kind of place.

The locals are an interesting lot … loggers, sheep farmers, forestry workers, fire fighters  … tough is a word that comes to mind. When the region was settled a couple of brothers called Ingram sired 30 kids between them.

So, chances are, you’ll be talking to one of their descendants in the pub, or outside the pub. Anywhere really.

Our host, Neil Ingram, told us he’d built the complex in 1989 and had returned recently to renovate the place. He’d been doing a good job and the pub attracted a crowd of locals and returning visitors. Apparently some motorcycle clubs also visit regularly and, says Neil, are really well behaved. I suspect they realise starting an argument with an Ingram in Delegate River would not be wise.

The Second Day

The water temperature was12 degrees at first light, warming to 13 degrees by about nine am. It was up and cloudy, as some light rain the night before had washed silt from where the bush fires had exposed sections of riverbank.

As part of environmental restoration projects by both NSW and Vic Governments, the willows along the bank had been removed and burnt, but this had allowed the blackberries and other weeds to flourish. Apparently, however, the latter is to be soon targeted for removal, as the second stage in the restoration project.

We started fishing on the stretch over the river from Brown’s Camp Road, in NSW walking north towards the Vic border, from a little concrete causeway, which had enough shag shit on it to restart the economy of Nauru. Pity the restoration project can’t do something about the shags. But, we figured if shags liked the spot that much, it was fishy enough for us.

The insect life under the flood night the night before had not been encouraging: we’d found a few caddis moths and some brown and black beetles. Not much really, when compared to earlier trips. So we started out with Warwick on Royal Wulff and me on black/brown nymph.

The weather warmed up and the flies arrived. A little tip for you, if you visit Delegate River in summer … pack a little head net. Not wanting to scare off any trout silly enough to fall for our clumsy presentations, we avoided insect repellent altogether and this made our faces a smorgasbord of sweat for a very friendly bunch of flies. After swallowing my second fly, I took out the net and pulled it over my hat.

Now, when wearing Polaroid shades under a camo head net, it gets a little hard to polaroid trout in murky water, quite apart from the fact that you look a little like Spiderman in green pyjamas … so I lost the sunnies and kept the net.

We’d been fishing for a couple of hours, basically blind casting into prospective spots. I stuck with the nymphs, varying the weight and depth, while Warwick tried a geehi beetle, CDC, emergers and even a woolly bugger.

Late morning, the water temperature rose to 14 degrees and we started to see the occasional wary trout, on the edges of some silty patches of river bottom, invariably under the protection of overhanging branches, to protect them from those damn shags.

I finally found a decent spot to cast and drifted an unweighted black nymph over a sandy patch and under a small branch … a momentary flash of white showed a trout had snatched at the nymph but missed. I tried another cast, which drifted back, and BANG! I was on.

A lovely two-pound brown trout on a three-pound tippet took some steering away from snags and overhanging blackberries before finally being landed and released. We fished on for two more hours. I had no more luck with wets, although Warwick had two hits on a Royal Wulff, despite the lack of any discernable rises.

By this time, it was early afternoon and we were hot, so we tramped overland back to the main road and walked back to the car. Another tip: when fishing the Delegate arrange to do it in a group of four, with more than one car and park the second car where you’re likely to end up, to avoid the walk back.

We had, of course, planned to do this, but one of our former fishing buddies – ex defence forces – in the second car couldn’t get leave and his mate decided the long drive from Melbourne on his own was just too much. He obviously wasn’t ex SAS and seems to have found his niche now, teaching in an up-market girls’ school, where long drives are frowned on. Anyway, we thought about him a lot when we walked four kilometres, sometimes running when the local kelpies decided to chase us, along the dirt road, wearing black neoprenes, under the early afternoon sun.

Back at Cabin two, Warwick tied some more dark nymphs.

Then, while I had a quiet nap he managed to catch the only large trout sharing the pool in front of the cabin with a feeding platypus, whom we had now named Bill.

Late afternoon, we tried the evening rise, in a couple of long pools, on the NSW side of the Tavern, with no luck. We tried pretty much every generic dry and wet in our boxes, and then we lengthened the leaders, despite the approaching dark and tried wets under dries, at varying depths … but no luck. In point of fact, for the first time in three visits, we didn’t see an evening rise on the Delegate, just gathering storm clouds, promising more rain later that night.

Oh, we saw another platypus and the biggest wombat in the southern hemisphere, about the same size as a small cow, hurtling through the undergrowth, fortunately on the other side of the river. It was running so fast, we thought the Ingrams were after it.

The Third Day

Following the previous night’s lack of feeding activity, heavy rain overnight and only a handful of insects on our floodlight activity monitor, we decided to head upstream into Victoria, to try to locate some cleaner water.

Second road on left, from the Tavern, Kirkenong Road, led down to the river a few kilometres up from the Tavern. We crossed the river, and walked uphill and upstream, away from a treacherously swampy part of the river, south of the road.

Under some large squiggly gums, we found a stretch of magnificent billabong-styled pools, with the water comparatively still on top, but moving quite swiftly underneath.

The humidity rose, storm clouds gathered and the blowflies again got friendly, so we resumed our Spiderman disguise and burrowed into the fly boxes, while we watched and waited, in vain, for signs of the big fish we’d been told were lurking in these waters.

For two hours, amid scattered rain, we saw absolutely nothing, in the way of insect activity or trout feeding. We tried casting pretty much every generic dry and wet we had in our bags, including some woolly buggers, at varying depths, but there was no response. The buggers were no good.

Feeling a little disconsolate, we decided to drive south to Bonang and try what we laughingly called our luck on the Bonang River. Now if you thought Delegate River was a little provincial, well Bonang makes it look positively cosmopolitan. We needed some petrol, and drove into what seemed to be the general store in Bonang, only to find a sign saying it was closed for half an hour. Despite this, as we were about to drive away, we noticed that the shop was in fact open, and I inquired gently of our hostess, as to the purpose of the sign … apparently, she explained, she’d meant to go home, to bring in the washing (it was about to storm, she said), but people kept arriving and interrupting her departure … now what did WE want.

After two deep frozen pies had been micro waved to a pulp and eaten, we inquired about the likely spots to fish on the Bonang, whereupon our hostess informed us that there weren’t many spots to get onto the water, what with the blackberries every where and then there’s the snakes. Now the blacks and the browns weren’t too bad, “but the Tigers will go ya. Especially on a day like today. With a bad storm comin’.”

The attractions of the Bonang then seemed to fade a little, in our eyes, and we decided to drive back to Delegate, humming the Duelling Banjos’ theme from Deliverance. To the left, the Bonang River was indeed completely overgrown with blackberries and weeds, leaving only a small stretch of water, as wide as a suburban drain and about as attractive.

On our right, as we headed back to the Tavern, we noted a couple of dirt tracks, leading up to the headwaters of the Delegate River, but we weren’t supposed to take the hire car off the bitumen, so we kept going and resolved to bring a four wheel drive next time.

We thought about the Pool of Confidence, but it was just on the other side of the tavern, so we had a beer and a game of darts instead. We were hot. In the Tavern later, we were assured by local fire fighters that there were some monster trout up there, in the headwaters of the Delegate, despite the best efforts of some Victorian environmentalists to wipe them out with poison and electrolysis, on the basis that the trout were an introduced species and hence a pest. Like sheep or cows, or most Australians, if it comes to that.

When you drive across the border, the NSW Government is promoting fly fishing tourism by continuing to allow restocking of the same River, so the actions of the Victorians, if correct, have simply been taking out the bigger breeders and trophy fish, as they head upstream to breed. Go figure. Maybe the people think trout only swim downstream, or perhaps they erected an underwater sign in trout, telling those pesky NSW trout not to swim into Victorian waters. River management is a national issue and should never be entrusted to State Governments.

The Fourth Day

 

The fourth day we headed downstream, to the saner waters of NSW, where trout fishermen aren’t regarded as a pest. Finding a good spot to enter the river, we knocked on the door of the local farmer, to ask permission to cross his land. The farmer – a friendly fellow by the name of Ingram – was fine about it and we promised to drop him off a trout.

The day was generally overcast, with the continual threat of rain. We fished about four kilometres of the Delegate, over some lovely looking pools and riffles. The local wildflowers were out, the platypuses were feeding and the place was a gob-smackingly beautiful little piece of Australia.

Again we tried a range of flies, with some mixed success. Every time the sun came out, there was some activity by the trout, in the form of surface rises. We had some hook-ups with smaller trout on Royal Wulffs and Royal Humpies. The riffles were prospective with dries as well. But again, only smaller trout were biting.

Nothing for farmer Ingram as yet. We were getting close to his farmhouse and I didn’t want to offend an Ingram. Then Warwick managed to hook a nice two-pound brown for farmer Ingram – and inexplicably let it go. I could have donged him.

Shortly afterwards, the storm hit in earnest and I promised the farmer a bottle of his favourite wine at the tavern instead of a trout, and we drove off with Warwick looking strangely pleased with himself.

I sped back past the Pool of Confidence and then beat him twice at darts. But who was counting?

By the end of our third Tooheys, we noticed that the rain had stopped, which was handy, as it the rising floodwaters bad been lapping at the door of the Tavern.

The rain would clearly make the river unfishable the next day, so we decided that this was our last chance to try the Pool of Confidence. We figured we needed some. We ducked down to the cabin and said hello to our new best friend, Bill the local platypus, as we climbed into our wet weather gear.

Back to the Pool of Confidence, where I decided to dispense with the niceties of the fancy dries, long leaders and poncy little wets.

The water was up and dirty and I needed to go as black and nasty as I could. Forget the long leader and light tippets and fancy rigs. Onto a six foot heavy leader went the biggest and blackest woolly bugger I had brought. It was one I’d tied myself, with long tail, chain eyes and liberal lashings of chenille. I put on an adjustable floating indicator and flicked it into the water, just up from the bridge.

If this didn’t work, after three beers, I didn’t care.

In the space of the next half hour, fishing through the drizzle, before the heavens well and truly opened, I’d landed three trout, up to two pounds and the woolly bugger was looking pretty tatty. So was I, really.

The fly just kept getting scoffed, after every few casts, over riffles, along the bubble lines, or beside deeply undercut banks. The rod just kept dipping. We opened one of them up and found out what they’d been eating for the past three days, while we tried every fly in the box.

The answer was, very little, just the odd worm. My first hit on a black nymph was the River’s first hint, and I’d forgotten it until nearly too late.

The Pool of Confidence had delivered. Next time we see the water up and dirty in this neck of the woods, it will be a big black woolly bugger, chain eyes, with lashings of chenille, on the line. In fact, I think I’ll take a few of my bigger Murray Cod flies and try those billabongs again, down deep this time. Ah confidence, it’s a wonderful thing.

Pictures by Warwick Powell.