Tackle Tactics » Tips-Techniques » Adrian-Webbs-Trout-Tips » Good Season Starter on Aglia-e Brite
Good Season Starter on Aglia-e Brite
By Adrian (meppstas) Webb
After having a short practice session in the Mersey River, a few days to hone the casting skills, it was now time to go and have a serious spin session to see if I could catch a trout or two. A new trout season was here and with the rivers still running a little on the high side, I decided the best area to fish was the upper reaches of the Mersey River. It was a mid-afternoon session, due to the weather being so cold, and it was 1:50pm by the time I reached the river. The river was a dark tannin colour, flowing reasonably fast and still a little on the high side for my liking.
Once in the river, the first thing that hit me was how cold the water was. It only took a few minutes before my feet and legs became very cold and I realised it was going to be a cold time in the river. The one-kilometre stretch of river that I fished today was one that I knew really well, as it was once my favourite area to fish. I used to fish here on a regular basis and had some great spin sessions here using the Mepps spinners, with several good double figure catches of brown and rainbow trout.
Then we had the record flood in June 2016, which was in the middle of the trout spawning season and that changed everything. After that the Mersey River has never been the same and the trout stocks have never really recovered since the floods. Yes, the trout are here but not in the good size and numbers that they were prior to the flood. The river itself also changed and when the trout season reopened that year it was like fishing a new river. Everything was different. The runs, fast waters and slow flowing areas, that I knew like the back of my hand, were gone as were the trout numbers.
It is slowly on the way back, however the biggest problem after the flood was the fact that the Inland Fisheries Service here in Tasmania would not restock the river with adult trout to help increase the river stocks. The IFS believe in self recruitment and have stated that the trout will come back, with good numbers of trout to be had in it. Six years on and the trout are starting to recover but not in good numbers, with most trout small to medium size fish. I still believe had they stocked the river, with a few hundred adult trout, the fish stocks would have been back three years ago. That's just my opinion.
Anyway, back to today's spin session and how it went. My lure of choice to start with was a Mepps #1 Aglia-e Brite inline spinner. This is a lure that really works well in cold water, plus it also stands out in dark tannin water. The trout setup was the Okuma Celilo ULS Finesse 2-6lb trout rod, coupled up with the Okuma ITX-1000 spinning reel, filled with Platypus 4lb Pulse mono line.
I wasn't all that confident of catching any trout today, mainly because of how it had fished previously since the flood. The first one hundred metres it wasn't looking all that good and it was looking like I was right on how the day was going to play out. It wasn't until I reached a wide, shallow stretch of river, that had a small narrow flat water to my left. To me, it was the ideal water to hold trout.
The first couple of casts and retrieves and nothing happened. It wasn't until I lobbed the spinner a little further up the flat water, that it was taken by a trout. I was finally onto my first trout of the 2022/23 season and all I was hoping was that it stayed on. After a brief tussle with the trout, it was in the net. Like most of the trout I've caught in this river it was a medium size brown and one that was in very good condition.
To the right of me was a wide, medium-flowing stretch of water, that had a nice bubble line running close to the riverbank. This was another area that may hold trout and it was also a nice stretch of water to cast and drift the Aglia-e Brite spinner. I don't know how many casts and retrieves I had done before the lure was hit hard and fast. This was a decent sized fish and it stayed deep for several seconds, before it hit the surface and that's when it all went downhill. On the third leap from the river, out popped the lure and it was gone in a flash. What was probably going to be the fish of the trip was lost and I wasn't at all happy either. Like I keep on saying and as much as it hurts to say it way too often… that's all a part of trout fishing. I estimated that brown trout to have been in the six to seven-hundred-gram range which hurt even more.
The water ahead of me was a little on the deep side, plus the flow was much stronger there, so I had to make my way back to the righthand side of the river. Once there I could carry on casting and drifting the spinner. After ten minutes without a sign of a trout, I made a change of lure. I went with the same model inline spinner, just a different colour. It was the orange one I chose, mainly because I have caught quite a few trout on it before in the Meander River as well as Western Creek. This will be the first time in the Mersey, so I wanted to give it a go here.
As I started to make my way along the shallow side of the river, a rock rolled underfoot which put me off balance and I took a tumble. I came down hard on my left knee and boy did it hurt. After that happened, I moved out into deeper water to let the cold water ease the pain and to help stop it from swelling up, which seemed to work pretty fast. Fifteen minutes passed by without a sign of a trout, so I went back to the rose (red) coloured Aglia-e Brite spinner. Five minutes later I hooked and landed the second brown trout of the afternoon, with that fish around the same size as the previous trout that I caught.
I felt that the best area to cast the lure into was close to the opposite side of the river, where the flow was at its slowest and where it would then draw the trout's attention. It did this a few times and I went on to catch another medium size brown trout from three hook ups. From here on the water ahead was deep and fast flowing, so I had to bypass it and that's when I decided to fish a small back water that ran along the right side of the river.
This was a long, narrow stretch of water that has always given up a trout or two. Today it was much deeper than normal but still safe to wade. The good thing was that the bottom of it was like a gravel pathway, nothing like the rocky main river bottom, so the odds of falling in were nil. It was 3:40pm when I started to fish my way upstream and the water was just below my waist. I was really starting to feel the cold on my body and not only that the air temperature dropped to 4 degrees.
I decided to fish my way upstream as fast as possible and hope that I could pick up a trout before I reached the top end of this back water. Thankfully, I managed to catch and release two more trout from three hook ups, by the time I reached the top end. That’s when I called it a day. To end the afternoon spin session with five trout being caught and released was great and a result that I didn't expect at all when I set out to fish this area. One other thing, I felt the orange colour of the Aglia-e probably wasn't suited to the dark tannin coloured water. There's one thing I do know, it is very well suited to clear cold water, where it's done a great job on the trout.
Adrian (meppstas)
Gear Used:
Okuma Celilo Finesse Spin Rod 2-6lb Trout Rod
Okuma ITX Carbon Spin Reel – ITX-1000
Platypus Pulse Mono – 4lb
Mepps Aglia-E Brite Inline Spinner