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One month to go, but Great Lake still tops
  |  First Published: July 2012



We only have a month to go before another brown trout season sparks us into action on a wider scale.

Now, you can sit in the warmth of your house and tie a bunch of flies, tie new leaders, sort through lures and sparkle up the tackle, or you can go catch some fish!

As I am increasingly becoming old and soft, I’ll opt for the comfort of the fly tying bench and roll out some spring spankers, but many of my more energetic angling comrades will be donning 500 layers of polar fleece and strapping some hunky-dory Tassie Devils and other hardbodied lures on and smacking the trout from here to oblivion.

Great Lake

Great Lake continues to astonish anglers with superb shallow water spin fishing along wind swept rocky shores. Even the deep and slow soft plastic experts are doing very well at this time of year.

It really makes me question why we have a closed season in any of our lakes at all – I’d love to be out on Arthurs Lake checking out the 3m deep scud beds and the midges drifting off the trees in the Morass.

Back at Great Lake and the shores around from Tods Corner to the dam wall have been fishing very well – the launching spot to use in my humble opinion is the Tods Corner ramp, especially if there is more north than west in the breeze.

While many of the browns in Great Lake are still very skinny, the patient angler is getting some very fat fish by concentrating on the deep weed beds between McLanachans Island and Becketts Bay. The biggest trout in Great Lake live here, so don’t be scared to strap on some really big deep diving lures and track down some thumpers.

Closer to civilisation, the shores around Swan Bay have been very kind to shore based anglers, with some great fish to be found chasing galaxia on the rocky shore opposite the pub.

Keep your eyes peeled and you never know what you will see.

Rainbow rising

I am not a fan of rainbow trout in Great Lake as I fail to see what is wrong with brown trout. In my opinion the condition of the brown trout population has fallen ever since IFS started loading thousands of rainbows in here. I’m sure I am pretty much a lone voice in this.

Having said that, the rainbows hunting along foam lines, slicks and close to shore have been splendid in the main, with far fewer skinny-malinkies than with the browns.

Some clever anglers have done extremely well targeting the Bee Hives with hardbodies more commonly used for bream fishing, with 70-90mm black and gold jerk bait style lures doing extremely well.

Good quality rainbow trout are the attraction at Great Lake in July.

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