With the cold weather well and truly here and the rivers closed for another year, all of our attention up here will be focused on the lake and Eildon Pondage.

I’m hoping that the bad weather we had in early June stopped the masses of people coming up and absolutely flogging the hell out of the Rubicon River. I’m sure many people know that some good-sized brook trout escaped via a wombat hide that caved in on one of the fish farms ponds.

I don’t want to sound like the fun police but at certain times this pristine little stream resembled Punt Road at 6 o’clock on a Friday night with every man and his dog lining up on the banks trying to catch a brook trout.

I understand that most of the anglers who travelled up to have a crack at the river would have done the right thing, but there were some people filling up eskies, which is just ridiculous in this day and age.

I’m hoping that the damage has not been too great, because the Rubicon River had more fishing pressure in a six or seven week period that would have been the equivalent of three years of normal traffic. But it wasn’t just the escapees, it was the browns and the rainbows that naturally populate the stream that were hit hardest, so it will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of seasons.

Who knows, maybe a few of the escaped brook trout might manage to spawn and we might get a small population of brook trout. Where possible we should catch and release any fish in the Rubicon for as long as we can and let it regenerate, it has been well and truly slaughtered.

With the lake on the rise again it can only be good news for anglers like me who love throwing soft plastics and hardbodied lures at the edges. I’m sure we will see the best winter’s trout fishing Eildon has seen for decades.

Local Mike Humphries and good mate David Ammerlaan had a grouse session recently with David landing a beautiful brown of around 3kg on a brown trout pattern deep diving hardbodied lure on the troll. What a cracking buck and still the reddies continue to fire with big numbers coming from all over the lake from 300g-1.5kg.

Now the pond is going to be steady for an extended period of time it should really fire up big time. It has been up and down like a yo-yo for months now.

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David Ammerlaan with a cracking buck brown trout of around 3kg caught in Lake Eildon on a trolled hardbodied lure.