Lake Wendouree has been a standout in what we could say has been a patchy start the autumn fishing.

The autumn fishing can be absolutely superb around Ballarat and surrounding waters but I believe that run of very hot weather has halted or slowed the action we would normally be having.

The very long hot summer and the dramatic temperature changes have had a massive affect on our fisheries. However on a positive note Lake Wendouree is back up and firing. It isn’t the mayfly-inspired fishing that many have been waiting for, but general angling we have seen excellent results.

Rod Parsons is been a regular at Lake Wendouree over the last few months and was rewarded recently with a magnificent 2kg brown trout on Power bait. Other land-based anglers have been catching both rainbow and brown trout using mudeyes suspended under a bubble float.

The Ballarat Fly fishers club recently held a two fly competition on the lake with excellent catches of rainbow and brown trout. The competition rules were you were to nominate two flies to use over the weekend they all went into a draw and the angler was balloted out two flies. If you lost either or both you were out of the competition.

The winner of the competition would have the longest fish and all fish were to be measured and then released. The weather for the competition played a very big feature in the results, with ideal overcast conditions on the Saturday and very windy conditions on the Sunday making the fishing very hard.

Most fish were caught on the Saturday with the winning flyfisher caught by legend John Rumph with a magnificent brown trout of 53cm.

The redfin have been on the bite here. Rod Severino and crew have been sneaking out there at first light and catching good bags of redfin on little black yabbies that they have caught from underneath the rocks. Rod said the water level is receding due to irrigation and the yabbies are on the move as the level goes down. Obviously the redfin have tuned in onto this as well I have received other reports of anglers casting soft plastics in yabby patterns have been getting good bags of redfin.

The redfin have finally started to come on the bite. This time last year the action was thick and fast with the best results using local minnows on a running sinker rig. Casting or trolling lures and casting soft plastics is the best shot, but the hardest thing is to find a school of redfin but when you do it’s game on. The trout in Tooliorook have been a little slow due the warm weather; as we move into some cooler conditions I expect they will certainly come on the bite.

The trout and redfin have started to come on the bite after a quiet period. The lake is filling up fast as water has been transferred from Lake Bellfield in the Grampians. This is awesome news as the trout will now start to cruise back in around the shallows and start to feed, giving anglers a good chance of catching some quality trout.

During autumn Lake Fyans is renowned for its early morning midge feeding trout. A boat and electric is essential to try and trick these trout into taking your fly patterns. My favourite a very small foam bodied mudeye moved slowly or fished stationery with the secret being you need to have your fly in front of the midge-feeding trout.