Over the past few months I’ve been saying Lake Fyans, located at the foot of the Grampian about an hour and a half from Ballarat, would be well worth the effort and yes, the anglers have been rewarded.

The Ballarat & District Anglers Association (BDAA) recently held the BDAA Shield at Fyans for all those angling clubs in and around the Ballarat region. The competition was held over two days with the winning club weighing the heaviest bag of fish.

There were seven clubs represented and a total of 51 anglers.

The Lakeside Anglers Club won the shield again for the second year in row with a total bag weight of 5.71kg comprising of 10 fish a mixture of trout and redfin.

Rod Mc Master caught the heaviest fish for the weekend with a magnificent brown trout of 1.53kg.

Other notable catches were the heaviest fish by a lady, which was a 510g rainbow trout and the heaviest by a junior, a 310g redfin.

The fishing was excellent with a total of 31 fish weighed over the weekend for a total clean weight of 14.46kg.

The fish were caught using lots of different angling methods including trolling lures, fishing baits like mudeye and gudgeon suspended under bubble floats and flyfishing.

Vern and Luke Barby did very well flyfishing and caught some lovely rainbow and brown trout on brown Woolly Bugger fly patterns.

Luke has been back to Lake Fyans since the competition with a few mates and they caught eight trout around 500g on brown Woolly Buggers from the shore.

The lake will continue to fish well over the next few months especially on evenings and into the night when the best mudeye hatches occur at this time of the year. There is also a chance of catching a real trophy trout.

Lake Purrumbete continues to fish well with Ross Goyne and Geoff Cramer getting amongst the redfin using gudgeon for bait and also jigging with Baltic Bobbers.

As I mentioned last month the redfin can’t refuse a moving bait and that’s where jigging bobbers come into the equation.

Geoff loves this style of fishing when it comes to targeting redfin. He has caught many a bag of redfin using this method at Purrumbete and other waters.

Now we are full swing into autumn, which is my favourite time of the year to fish freshwater.

As the water temperatures fall, the trout start to once again feed actively around the edges and on the surface, so it’s time to get out on the water and wet a line.

Over the coming months I will be spending some time at Lake Fyans, Purrumbete and sneak around our local waters in the Ballarat region to Newlyn, Cosgroves and Tullaroop reservoirs.