Before we left Australia, I wrote that for most of my adult life the rivers had dictated the journey. They decided where I stayed, when I travelled, which roads I followed and how long I remained in any one place. Towns became useful because they sat beside water. Lodgings were judged by their proximity to boat ramps. Weather mattered because of what it might do to a hatch. Much of the American West entered my life through rivers first and everything else second.

This trip was different. For the first time in sixteen years, my wife travelled with me. Our children came too. There were still rods in the vehicle and familiar stretches of water waiting to be revisited, but the rivers were no longer responsible for every decision. We began on the California coast, crossed the deserts of Nevada and Utah and gradually worked towards Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

What surprised me, though, was how little I minded the days when we did not fish.

Without the usual urgency of clients, guides and trout, I had time to notice the places between the rivers. The diner where the coffee arrived before we had properly sat down. The service station attendant who wanted to know why four Australians were driving north through his town. The grain elevator standing above a Main Street that had outlived several versions of America. The old motel signs, the faded shopfronts and the roads that seemed to continue long after there was any obvious reason for them to do so.

These were not the destinations around which the journey had been planned. They were the spaces between them. Yet, looking back, they became much of what I remember most.

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The first part of the trip belonged to the coast and the desert. After two nights in Santa Monica, the landscape began to open. Los Angeles receded into freeway, heat and distance, and the country changed in stages. The Pacific disappeared behind us. Palms gave way to scrub. The horizon widened. By the time we reached Nevada, the distances and dimensions of the West had started to reveal themselves again.

One of the first things the family noticed was the vehicle. My wife had expressed some doubts before we left about the need for something quite so enormous. She had never done one of these long American road trips with me before, and from Australia the insistence on a Suburban or Denali-sized vehicle probably seemed excessive. I was equally insistent that anything smaller would be a mistake.

Within the first few hours, the argument was settled. Everyone had their own large, deeply comfortable seat, their own air-conditioning and enough space around them to avoid feeling as though four people were living on top of one another for several weeks. The seats were closer to the sofas and recliners we have at home than anything most Australians would associate with a car. Bags, suitcases, food, jackets, fishing gear and the assorted debris of family travel disappeared into the back without compromising anyone’s comfort.

The sheer size of the vehicle suited the landscape. You sat higher above the road and felt more secure, but also more a part of the American road trip itself. A small vehicle might have been easier to park, but it would have felt entirely wrong on those long western highways.

It was also considerably cheaper to run than expected. Fuel was an eye-watering $5.50 a gallon in California, but by the time we reached Utah and continued north it had dropped towards four dollars, then closer to $3.50 in Montana. The Denali we ended up with was more fuel-efficient than my Ford Ranger at home, despite having twice the space, three times the power and an abundance of comfort. After several thousand kilometres, none of us wanted anything smaller.

Las Vegas is often described as a city in the desert, but that hardly captures the strangeness of it. It feels less like a city than a concentrated act of defiance. Glass, neon, air-conditioning, fountains and spectacle push up against a landscape that does not appear particularly interested in supporting any of it.

For three days we moved through that contradiction.

The children saw it with the kind of enthusiasm adults sometimes lose. The sheer scale of the hotels, the absurdity of the themed buildings, the crowds, the noise, the constant invitation to look at something else. It was a long way from home and a long way from the rivers that usually explain my presence in America.

From there, Utah arrived. The colour of the country changed first. Then its shape.

 

The walls of Zion rose around us with an authority that photographs never quite manage to convey. The roads narrowed. The rock closed in. Light moved slowly across the canyon walls and every change in angle produced another version of the same place. Even after years of travelling through the West, it was difficult not to feel overwhelmed by it.

In Springdale, we hired electric bikes and rode all the way into the canyon to the end of the road. The weather was slightly overcast, holding the temperature somewhere in the high twenties or low thirties, rather than the oppressive heat we had expected. It turned what might have been an endurance exercise into one of the great days of the journey.

There were moments while riding when I looked up and the canyon walls appeared to rise hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet directly above us. In places they seemed vertical. In others they appeared to lean beyond vertical and hang over the road. The scale was difficult to process from the seat of a bicycle. Deer scattered from the roadside as we passed, the air moved through the canyon and the walls changed colour whenever the light shifted or the road altered our angle of view.

Of everything we did, that ride through Zion may have been the highlight of the trip for me. There was no windscreen between us and the landscape, no searching for a parking space and no pressure to hurry. We simply rode beneath those walls and allowed the canyon to reveal itself gradually.

Further east, the landscape opened again around Moab. Red cliffs, arches, distant mesas and heat that seemed to settle over everything. There were days when the temperature climbed well beyond forty degrees and the only sensible response was to retreat to a swimming pool and wait for the evening. The wildlife appeared only when the light faded and the day began to lose its sting.

Moab itself and much of the immediate surrounding country can appear surprisingly drab beside the landscapes people have travelled there to see. Once you climb onto the plateau and enter Arches National Park, however, the country changes completely. The view as you crest that final rise is worth the price of admission alone.

The park is relatively compact, but every section seems to offer a different arrangement of stone. Arches, fins, balanced rocks and formations that appear too improbable to have survived rise from the plateau. As the hours pass, the light moves across them and the same landscape takes on an entirely different character. A formation that appears flat and colourless at midday can glow red and orange by evening, while another almost disappears into shadow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The desert around Moab also offers a different kind of exploration. We took a float trip down the Colorado River, moving through a landscape that felt more remote from the water than it had from the road. Cliffs rose from the river, the heat settled across the canyon and the immensity of the country became apparent in a way it had not from the overlooks.

It was not trout country, but it was flowing water, and the pools, seams and eddies carried a language I understood.

The desert teaches a totally different form of patience. Rivers encourage movement. You walk, cast, drift, mend, adjust and search. The desert asks you to stand still. It works on a larger scale and over a slower timeframe. Nothing appears hurried, yet everything is changing. Wind reshapes sand just as water cuts stone. Shadows redraw the same wall over the course of an afternoon.

It is difficult to move through that country without becoming aware of your own smallness. That may be part of its appeal.

Most of us spend our lives surrounded by objects built to human proportions. Houses, roads, offices, cars, shops. In canyon country, scale becomes less reassuring. The land is older, larger and entirely indifferent to the fact that you have arrived with a camera and an itinerary. You feel that indifference the moment you step away from the roadway and into the landscape.

There were moments when the kids were bored. Moments when they were tired. Moments when the heat had stripped the novelty from the day. Then we would turn a corner, walk out onto another overlook or catch the last light on a distant cliff and everything would reset.

Travel often works that way. It is not one uninterrupted sequence of wonder. It is heat, traffic, wrong turns, hunger, fatigue and argument, interrupted by moments so complete they justify everything around them.

From Utah we headed north.

The country began to soften gradually. The red rock thinned. The air cooled. Trees returned in greater numbers. Somewhere beyond Salt Lake City, water began to appear more frequently beside the road.

That transition has always mattered to me and is a large part of why I tend to fly into Salt Lake City rather than taking the easier route directly into Bozeman. You can feel when you are entering trout country before you see the first river. The valleys change shape. Cottonwoods gather along drainage lines. Meadows become greener. Bridges begin to suggest water worth stopping for.

The South Fork of the Snake. The Henry’s Fork. The Teton. The Green. Names that have occupied my imagination for much of my adult life. Normally I would have begun organising the trip around them immediately. There would have been calls to friends, weather checks, hatch reports, river levels and quiet attempts to extract another day from the schedule.

This time I found myself looking elsewhere. At the Tetons from the Wyoming side. At the long roads between small towns. At Jackson with its wooden boardwalks, antler arches and summer crowds. At the children trying to understand why certain places mattered more to us than others.

Sixteen years earlier, Maree and I had stood beneath the Tetons and been married with four witnesses, rising trout and a grizzly bear that had chosen the wrong morning for a walk. Returning with our children changed the meaning of the place.

The mountains were the same. The roads were familiar. The view from Schwabacher Landing had lost none of its power. Yet the experience was no longer anchored only to memory. It had become something shared.

That was the quiet change running through the entire trip.

For years, I had returned to the American West as a guide, host, angler or photographer. This time I was seeing familiar places reflected back through three other people. Their interests were not always mine. One child wanted shops, music and wildlife. The other wanted World Cup matches, activities and anything involving speed. My wife wanted us to slow down, walk the trails and make the most of whatever each day offered.

All of that altered the rhythm.

Island Park became our base for exploring Yellowstone and the surrounding country. It was also where we hired UTVs and travelled along mountain tracks through the forest towards Mesa Falls.

We drove to the top of Sawtelle Peak on a road that became narrower and steeper with every turn. By the time we reached the upper sections, I caught myself wondering whether I would be able to drive the UTV back down. The track clung to the mountain, the drop beside us became increasingly difficult to ignore and the summit seemed to move further away each time the road doubled back.

The view from the top justified the climb. Mountains, forests and distant valleys spread out in every direction. On the tracks below, we spooked moose and deer from the timber, although no bears appeared. Depending on which member of the family you asked, this was either a disappointment or a considerable relief.

There was less fishing. There was also more noticing. Yellowstone made that impossible to avoid.

No matter how many times you visit, the park resists familiarity. Steam rises from the ground. Bison stop traffic as though roads are a temporary inconvenience. Elk stand in meadows with the ease of animals that understand the landscape belongs to them. A moose steps into a river and suddenly an entire group of strangers becomes silent.

It is easy to become cynical about famous places. Crowds, queues, traffic and cameras can make even extraordinary landscapes feel processed. Yellowstone survives that pressure because something unexpected is always waiting beyond the next bend.

It might be a herd of bison crossing a valley. Or a wolf disappearing into timber. It could be a thermal basin half-hidden beneath the morning vapour. Or a moose feeding in water so calm that the reflection appears almost too perfect.

 

 

 

The park restores perspective in much the same way the desert does, but by different means. The desert does it through emptiness. Yellowstone does it through abundance, with wildlife, water, weather, geology and distance all competing for attention at once.

The children responded immediately. Not always with quiet reverence. Sometimes with shouting, arguing over binoculars or trying to take photographs through a moving window. But the excitement was real.

I think that matters. Adults often pretend the natural world is best appreciated silently. Children are less restrained. They react before deciding how they are supposed to react. There is an honesty in that, one that allows us to be less serious and to enjoy the moment before deciding what it is supposed to mean. Through them, I was seeing again with fresh eyes an experience I had repeated through many Australian winters.

The Fourth of July introduced another kind of spectacle. Australians tend to be suspicious of too much public enthusiasm. We are trained early to keep emotion within acceptable limits and to mock anything that appears overly earnest. Americans do not always share that instinct.

Small towns celebrate themselves with remarkable confidence. Flags appear everywhere. Streets close. Horses, old vehicles, tractors, marching bands and homemade floats move through town while entire families line the footpaths.

There is no embarrassment in it. No apology. No effort to appear detached.

The parade we watched was loud, colourful, occasionally absurd and completely sincere. People dressed in red, white and blue from head to toe. Children collected sweets thrown from passing floats. Veterans moved slowly along the parade route. Families occupied the same patch of footpath they had probably used for years. Some brought lawn chairs and settled onto the verge. Others watched from the backs of pickup trucks, tailgates down and coolers filled with ice-cold drinks.

It would be easy to reduce the Fourth of July to politics or patriotism, but in small towns it often feels more personal than that. It is partly about memory. Partly about community. Partly about the right to make noise in public and assume everyone else will join in. For visitors, it offers a glimpse of America at its least self-conscious.

That became another recurring feature of the trip: the willingness to participate. In Australia, people often watch first and decide later whether an experience deserves enthusiasm. In America, particularly in smaller towns, people are more likely to step forward, wave, shout, clap, ask where you are from and offer an opinion before you have had time to introduce yourself.

That openness can be exhausting. But it can also be generous in a way not easily found here at home. Some of the conversations I remember most happened in places where we had not intended to stop. At a fuel station. In a diner. Outside a general store. Beside a road sign while trying to decide whether to keep driving further before the darkness crept back in.

While the famous destinations gave the journey structure, it was the incidental encounters that gave it texture. By the time we reached Montana, we had entered another version of the West entirely, and even the children could feel the difference.

The towns grew smaller. Grain elevators and storage towers rose above the plains, marking settlements long before the streets themselves came into view. Old bars and shops sat beside roads carrying traffic towards somewhere else. Mountains rose and fell in the distance. Rivers moved through valleys with the confidence of water that has shaped the place for longer than anyone remembers.

Montana has always been easy to romanticise. The name itself does half the work. Big sky, long roads, trout rivers, mountain towns and the lingering mythology of the West. But the version I have come to value most is not the postcard version. It is the working landscape. The trucks parked outside a bar at midday. The rail sidings and storage sheds. The service stations. The taco buses parked in dusty lots beside the highway. The small stores that appear to sell groceries, fishing tackle, ammunition and local gossip from the same counter.

The towns where people live ordinary lives inside scenery that visitors have travelled thousands of kilometres to see. That contrast interests me more each year. The extraordinary and the everyday occupying the same place. For someone passing through, the mountains dominate everything. For someone who lives there, they are simply the view on the way to work.

Eventually the rivers reclaimed their place. They always do. We saw water through cottonwoods. Riffles appeared beside the road. Bridges invited closer inspection. Familiar names returned on signs and maps. There is a deep familiarity in returning to places that, over the years, have become another kind of home.

Of course, there were rods in the vehicle and even a few opportunities to fish.

On the South Fork of the Snake, a few large stoneflies were still around, but perhaps more importantly, the memory of those big insects remained fresh in the trout’s minds. Getting the fly tight to the bank and close to structure was absolutely imperative.

Large rubber-legged flies teased along the edges, or pulled slightly away from them, produced violent takes. Once the fly had travelled five or six feet from the bank, there was little point continuing the drift. You recast and placed it within an inch of the edge again. Some of the rises were spectacular, and some large trout were brought to the net.

The Teton River was far below its normal level, but the evening hatches remained strong. Caddis and mayflies appeared in enormous numbers, and as the light softened the river became dimpled with rising fish from one bank to the other.

The water was crystal clear. From the road bridges, fish could be seen holding in surprising numbers, and whenever we looked back into the low evening sun we saw dorsal fins, tails and snouts breaking the surface as trout mopped up the last of the insects from the hatch.

Around Island Park, we found spring creeks full of large rising fish. These trout demanded considerably more precision. Accuracy mattered. Fly selection mattered. Leader length and diameter mattered. The rewards, when everything came together, were worth the additional care.

Yet even then, the urgency was missing. I no longer felt compelled to turn every encounter with water into a session. Some rivers were enough to look at. Some were enough to remember. Some could wait. I borrowed a boat from friends when I felt like it. At other times, we wet-waded for a few hours and called it a day.

That may have been the most surprising change of all. For years, my travel had been measured by what I managed to fit into it. Rivers fished. Images taken. Places reached. Opportunities used. This time the journey felt complete without being maximised.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter lessons of age. Or perhaps I am selectively remembering the journey to suit a narrative I have already begun to believe. Most likely it is a little of both. Wherever the truth lies, I do not think ambition disappears. Selection simply becomes more important. You learn that doing everything is impossible and that trying often diminishes what is already in front of you.

A day spent moving slowly through Yellowstone does not need to end with fishing. A road through Montana does not need to be justified by where it leads. A town does not need to be famous to be worth stopping in. The places between rivers are not empty spaces. They are part of the journey.

That breathing room, and the freedom from feeling that every fish had to be wrung from every day, also changed the way I thought about the Montana trips we will host again next year. It allowed me to notice far more of what lies between the fishing locations, particularly on the travel days. I came home with a much clearer sense of how that time can become part of the experience rather than simply the distance that has to be covered. There are towns, landscapes, short detours and places worth stopping that will give the journey more shape without taking anything away from the fishing.

Back home, with winter settled over Victoria and the familiar work of another season waiting, I find myself thinking less about the places we reached than about the way we moved between them. The distance was never simply empty road. It gave us time to talk, to look, to change our minds and to stop when something unexpected caught our attention. In a journey measured across thousands of kilometres, those pauses became as important as the destinations themselves.

Looking back through the photographs, the pattern is obvious. There are rivers, mountains and wildlife, but also roadside signs, diners, old buildings, parades, shopfronts, service stations and people standing in landscapes they are seeing for the first time. There are fewer fish than usual. And I don’t mind that. Not one little bit.

For most of my adult life, the rivers have dictated the journey. This time they were simply part of it. They waited while we crossed deserts, stopped in small towns, watched bison block roads and stood beneath mountains that had already witnessed one important moment in our lives.

The rivers were still there when we arrived. The hatches continued without us. The trout rose whether we were watching or not. What changed was the attention we gave to everything around them.

Perhaps that is what the trip ultimately became. Not a journey away from rivers, but a reminder that they do not exist apart from the country through which they flow, or the lives that unfold beside them. Next year, when I return with another group of anglers, the rivers will still give the journey its shape. But I suspect we will travel a little more slowly between them.

There will still be hatches to chase, boats to launch and fish worth staying late for. There will also be towns worth visiting, roads worth following and reasons to stop that have nothing to do with trout. The places between rivers are not simply what we pass through on the way to somewhere else.

They are part of what brings us back.

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At midnight on Monday, the Victorian trout season closed.

For most anglers, the date arrives with a familiar sense of finality. Rods are put away, waders are hung up to dry, and the stretches of river that have occupied our thoughts for months are suddenly left behind until spring. Another season is added to the ledger. Another opening day and another closing day pass into memory. Yet after a lifetime spent guiding on rivers, I have come to view the occasion a little differently. The river itself is not shutting down. In many ways, it is only now entering one of the most important periods of its year.

Over the coming weeks, brown trout throughout Victoria will move upstream towards the gravel beds where they will spawn. Fish that have spent the season spread throughout the system will gather in tributaries and headwaters, driven by instincts far older than any angler. The boats disappear. The foot traffic fades from the banks. The pressure of a long fishing season gradually lifts. For a few months, the river belongs almost entirely to itself again.

Perhaps because so much of modern life encourages us to believe that everything exists for our use, our enjoyment or our convenience. We photograph everything, measure everything and analyse everything. We track river levels by the hour, study weather forecasts days in advance and compare catches before we have even reached the car park. There is a tendency to view the natural world through the lens of what it can provide us. Yet every year the trout season closes and nature quietly reminds us that these rivers were never really ours in the first place. The fish continue their journey upstream. The river settles into winter. Life carries on perfectly well without our participation.

When I was younger, I struggled with that idea. Like most anglers, I always wanted one more day. One more hatch. One more opportunity. There was a time when the closing of the season felt frustrating, almost unfair. Age has a way of changing your perspective. These days I find myself appreciating the pauses almost as much as the activity. The older I become, the more I recognise that every worthwhile thing exists within a rhythm. There is a season for effort and a season for recovery. A season for activity and a season for stillness.

For guides, the end of the season brings its own peculiar transition. For much of the year my life is measured not by months but by rivers. The first Saturday in September arrives and suddenly everything begins moving again. Boats come out of storage. River levels become important. Weather forecasts become daily reading. Clients arrive from around Australia and beyond. Days fill with travel, guiding, teaching and all the variables that make fly fishing endlessly fascinating and occasionally maddening.

Then, almost overnight, it stops.

I have experienced that transition dozens of times and it still feels strange. One morning there is a drift boat to launch, a lesson to teach or a trip to prepare for. A few days later the phone becomes quieter, the calendar opens up and there is nowhere in particular you need to be. The river moves on without you. Part of the feeling is relief. Part of it is exhaustion. Yet there is always a small sense of disorientation as well. When a rhythm has governed most of your life for eight or nine months, its sudden absence leaves a noticeable space behind.

The first weeks of winter are usually spent attending to all the jobs that have patiently waited in the background. Boats need maintenance. Gear needs sorting. Thousands of photographs need organising. Emails need answering. Projects that have been pushed aside during the busy months finally receive attention. This year, however, one project sits above all the others.

After several years of work, my book is finally nearing completion.

What began as a simple idea gradually evolved into something much larger than I ever expected. Most weeks involved twenty or thirty hours of writing squeezed around guiding, travel and family commitments. Chapters were written late at night after long days on the water, during quiet afternoons between trips and in motel rooms scattered across Australia, New Zealand and the United States. There was never a dramatic moment where it suddenly felt finished. Instead, it grew slowly, one page and one season at a time.

As I worked through the final manuscript this autumn, something else began to dawn on me. Some of the earliest pieces had been written so long ago that they almost felt as though they belonged to somebody else. One chapter contains an observation about surgeon clients being accustomed to commanding operating theatres full of nurses rather than taking instruction from somebody half their age wearing sandals. I smiled when I read it again. Not because the observation was wrong, but because it inadvertently revealed when it had been written. Next month I turn fifty-four. The person who wrote those words was still in his twenties or early thirties. Reading some of those passages felt a little like opening an old photograph album and discovering details you had forgotten were there.

Throughout the editing process I kept encountering moments like that. A phrase here. An opinion there. A reference to a river that no longer fishes quite the same way. The book gradually became more than a collection of stories. It became a conversation across time between different versions of myself. Life moved on while the pages remained where they had always been, waiting to be revisited.

When I finally sat down and attempted to tally the hours, the figure surprised even me. Since last July, I estimate I have devoted somewhere between twelve hundred and twelve hundred and fifty hours to the manuscript. Spread across the calendar, that works out to roughly twenty-five hours every week for almost a year, the equivalent of about thirty full-time working weeks.

What the figure does not capture is the opportunity cost. During the first half of the fishing season, I deliberately turned down a number of guiding weeks so I could stay home and write. For the first time in thirty years, I found myself saying no to days on the river so I could spend time at a keyboard writing about them. That was not always an easy decision. Guiding is what I do. It is how the business operates and, in many respects, how I have organised much of my adult life. Yet there came a point where the book would either remain a project I talked about on drifts, or it would finally become a project I finished. Somewhere along the way, it ceased to be simply a business project and became a personal obligation.

Most of those twelve hundred hours will never be visible to a reader. They exist in deleted paragraphs, rewritten chapters, abandoned introductions and countless small decisions that nobody else will ever notice. They are hidden in late nights after long guiding days, quiet winter mornings, motel rooms, airport lounges and stolen hours between family commitments.

The illustrations are now underway, and the layout process will begin shortly. If all goes according to plan, the finished book should appear around Father’s Day. For the first time, the finish line is beginning to come into view. Reaching that point has prompted me to consider the path that led here and the surprisingly central role rivers have played in shaping it.

In a few days we will leave Australia and head for the American West. For the first time in many years, this trip is not primarily about fishing or hosting clients. It is first and foremost a family adventure. We will begin in California before travelling through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. There will be deserts and canyons, mountain ranges and national parks, small towns and long stretches of open road. My wife and children will experience much of it for the first time, and I suspect seeing familiar places through their eyes will be every bit as rewarding as visiting the places themselves.

It occurred to me that almost every major chapter of my life has been shaped in some way by rivers. Businesses were built beside them. Friendships emerged from them. Journeys began because of them. Some of our most memorable family holidays eventually found their way back to water. Even many of the people who now occupy important places in our lives first entered through a shared interest in rivers. Sometimes that feels deliberate. More often, it simply feels inevitable.

That thought has caused me to consider how much of my life has been spent following water. Not consciously at first, and certainly not according to any grand plan. Yet when I think about the major turning points in my life, waterways seem to appear with surprising regularity. The Goulburn. The Rubicon. The Delatite. The Jamieson. The Mataura. The Oreti. The Missouri. The Madison. The Yellowstone. Different countries, different landscapes and different cultures, yet somehow connected.

Most people divide their lives into decades, jobs, houses or cities. Increasingly, I find myself remembering periods of life through rivers. A flood. A drought. My first drift boat. The first season in New Zealand. The first Montana trip. Particular clients who became lifelong friends.

When I think about those periods, I rarely begin with the year itself. Instead, I begin with the water. I remember the drought years on the Goulburn. The seasons when willow grubs seemed to fall in their thousands from every tree. The first years rowing a drift boat when every day felt like an experiment. The early New Zealand seasons when we were still learning which valleys held fish and which simply held hope. Even family milestones seem attached to rivers. Places, journeys and memories gradually blur together until it becomes difficult to separate one from the other.

Years later, I still find those memories anchored to surprisingly small details. A bend where an evening hatch suddenly appeared. A gravel bar where an important conversation took place. A valley where a river turned unexpectedly from calm to whitewater. A quiet backwater where somebody finally landed a trout they had dreamed about for years. The details themselves may seem insignificant, but they become markers in time.

The longer I spend around rivers, the more similarities I notice between them. Current behaves the same way whether it is flowing beneath a willow tree in Victoria or a cottonwood in Montana. Trout still seek comfort, security and food. A seam remains a seam. An eddy remains an eddy. Good water still looks like good water. The details change, but the underlying language remains remarkably familiar.

Perhaps that familiarity explains why anglers travel. We often speak about chasing something different, but I suspect we are equally drawn by what feels recognisable. There is comfort in standing beside a river on the other side of the world and understanding what you are looking at. The same currents. The same possibilities. The same small mysteries. Geography changes. The fundamentals do not.

As I get older, I find that reassuring. The destinations change. The people change. The seasons change. Yet rivers continue flowing quietly through the background of our lives, connecting one chapter to the next. A river fished twenty years ago can suddenly return to memory because of a smell, a photograph or a familiar piece of water somewhere else. The thread is never entirely broken.

Over the coming weeks our attention will gradually shift from Australian rivers to American ones. There will be photographs, stories and, hopefully, a few observations worth sharing along the way. Beyond that, another New Zealand season waits on the horizon, followed by the familiar cycle beginning once again.

For now, though, the Goulburn is quiet. The boats are out of the water. The trout are moving upstream. Winter has arrived.

And somewhere beyond the horizon, another river is already beginning to call.

It always does.

Anthony Boliancu
Drift Boat Guide

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Reflections from the final week on the Goulburn

By the final week of the trout season, the boat ramps on the Goulburn are generally quiet. The summer visitors have gone, the mornings are cold and even the regulars seem to choose their days more carefully. It is a considerable change from September, when anglers return after winter with new equipment, fresh leaders and all the optimism that comes with the beginning of another season.

I’ve always enjoyed these final days. There are usually a few trout still rising, particularly when the weather settles and the smaller autumn mayflies begin appearing. The river is often low and clear, making it possible to fish sections that were inaccessible during the heavier summer releases. There is little reason to hurry, and after months spent guiding, I find the absence of other boats rather pleasant.

Looking back, this has been an unusual season in several respects. In November, I experienced one of the busiest mornings I can remember on the Goulburn. Over the course of a couple of hours, four commercial rafts managed to get ahead of me. It seemed that every guiding operation in Victoria had chosen the same section of river on the same morning. Yet after returning from New Zealand in March, I did not encounter another commercial boat for the remainder of the season. Not one.

I have spent more than 150 days on the water, and there were other peculiarities. Perhaps the strangest was the almost complete absence of snakes. I saw only three throughout the season, all swimming across the river. None at the boat ramps, none along the banks and none during those occasions when I stepped out of the boat into somewhere that looked particularly promising for a snake. After so many years working on the Goulburn, I have become accustomed to seeing considerably more of them. I have no particular explanation for their absence, although I cannot say I was especially disappointed.

The fishing itself was inconsistent, with some excellent periods interrupted by days when the trout were remarkably difficult to find. There were occasions when conditions appeared almost perfect, yet we struggled to raise a fish. At other times, an unexpected hatch or a small change in river level transformed things within a matter of hours. I tend to remember individual days rather than the season as a whole, and several of those stand out for reasons that have little to do with how many trout we caught.

One involved a client I first met twenty-nine years earlier. He was travelling through Australia on his gap year when we originally fished together, and this season he returned with his daughter, who had recently finished high school. It was an extraordinary thing to consider. When I first met him, he was a young man travelling through a country on the other side of the world. Nearly three decades later, he was back on the same river with a daughter approaching the age he had been during that first visit.

There were moments during the day when I found myself thinking about how much had happened in the intervening years. He had established a career, raised a family and returned to a place that had evidently remained important to him. From my perspective, it was another day on a river I had scarcely left during those years. I have guided several generations of some families now, but encounters like that still catch me by surprise.

We also welcomed back a number of clients who had been absent for several seasons. Some had travelled with us extensively through New Zealand, Montana and Patagonia before gradually disappearing from the bookings. I had occasionally wondered what had become of them. There are plenty of reasons people stop travelling or fishing for a while, and it is not always appropriate to ask. Then a familiar name appears in an email or somebody telephones about another trip, and the conversation resumes with surprisingly little difficulty.

One of the more entertaining incidents involved a trout feeding on willow grubs. We had located the fish and were presenting a small imitation when it took the fly and everything promptly went wrong. The fish came unstuck, and I assumed that would be the end of our opportunity. Instead, it immediately resumed feeding in almost exactly the same position. We watched it for a while, made another presentation and hooked it again. This time we landed the trout and recovered both flies. I have seen some unusual behaviour from fish over the years, but I cannot remember many occasions when the same trout has given us two opportunities quite so obligingly.

There were memorable days away from the Goulburn as well. Perhaps my favourite day with a fly rod during the wider fishing year was spent alone on Montana’s Upper Madison, in the Slide section below Quake Lake. The river there runs through enormous boulders deposited during the 1959 earthquake, creating long stretches of turbulent water where the trout occupy the relatively quieter pockets between rocks. I spent the day casting large dry flies into those small areas, often finding fish in places where the current seemed almost too violent to hold them.

I saw no other anglers. The sound of the river was constant, and I had enough water ahead of me to keep walking for as long as I wanted. I caught some beautiful trout, but I particularly enjoyed being able to fish without considering anybody else’s timetable. After spending so much of my life helping other people catch fish, a full day devoted entirely to my own fishing is something I still appreciate enormously.

That Montana trip also provided a reminder of how fortunate I have been with the people who have travelled with us over the years. A difficult series of late withdrawals left me carrying considerably more financial risk than I had anticipated. Some clients became aware of the situation and offered assistance in ways they were under no obligation to provide. They did not make a fuss about it or expect recognition. They simply understood what had happened and wanted to help. I have not forgotten their generosity.

It would be easy to describe the past season entirely through fishing reports, river levels and the trout we caught. Those things occupy much of my attention while the season is underway. Yet when I look back, it is often the people and the more unusual incidents that I remember most clearly. A client returning after nearly thirty years, an old friend getting back in touch or a trout behaving in a way that leaves everyone in the boat laughing. They are difficult things to anticipate when we begin organising the next season’s bookings.

There are still a few days of fishing left before the winter closure. After that, the boats and trailers will need servicing, equipment will be cleaned and repaired, and the usual collection of administrative jobs will demand attention. I will be heading towards another Montana season before long, while preparations for New Zealand are already underway. We also have a family road trip approaching, and there is a manuscript occupying whatever time remains between everything else.

I suspect winter will pass quickly.

For now, I would like to squeeze in another drift or two. The Goulburn has been an unpredictable river this season, and there are still sections I would like to revisit before it closes. After more than 150 days on the water, I am tired enough to appreciate the prospect of a break, but not quite ready to put the oars away.

Ant

Late May on the Goulburn

By the third week of May, there are noticeably fewer anglers along the Goulburn. The opening-weekend crowds are a distant memory, the summer visitors have largely disappeared and even the regulars seem to become more selective about which days they spend on the water. Football has reclaimed the weekends, the mornings are cold enough to make getting out of bed a less attractive proposition, and the prospect of standing in a river for several hours no longer holds quite the same appeal it did in November.

For those of us still fishing, however, May can be a particularly enjoyable time. The river is generally lower, the water often exceptionally clear and the trout can feed steadily through the warmer part of the day. There is less of the frantic activity associated with the summer hatches, but the fishing can be wonderfully absorbing. A good fish rising repeatedly in a quiet pool is reason enough to spend a considerable amount of time in one place, particularly when there is nobody else waiting to fish it.

The change in the river is usually well underway by this stage. As irrigation demand declines, releases from Lake Eildon often begin falling towards their winter levels. Gravel bars that spent summer beneath several feet of water become visible again, while long runs and glides gradually regain the appearance they had before the heavier releases. Some of the aquatic vegetation that developed through the warmer months begins thinning, and the current lines become easier to distinguish as the river settles.

These changes affect where trout hold and feed. Water that provided excellent cover during the higher flows may become too shallow or exposed, while seams and runs that were difficult to fish through summer become accessible again. The fish gradually adjust to those conditions, often occupying positions that allow them to intercept drifting food without expending unnecessary energy against the current. On the clearer days, some can be watched for considerable periods, holding close to the bottom before moving briefly into a feeding lane.

May is also a month when the insects become smaller and less conspicuous. The large terrestrial insects that occupied so much of our attention through summer have mostly disappeared, although the occasional beetle or cricket can still find its way onto the water. Midges become increasingly important, along with small mayflies such as Baetis, which can produce surprisingly good hatches when conditions are suitable.

On a calm afternoon, a modest emergence of these little mayflies can bring trout into the slower water. The first indication may be a single rise in the tail of a pool, followed a few minutes later by another farther upstream. Eventually several fish may begin feeding, although the activity rarely announces itself with the enthusiasm of the larger spring and summer hatches. Sometimes the rises are little more than dimples, barely disturbing the surface as the trout take insects sitting low in the film.

This is fishing that rewards a careful approach. Longer leaders, fine tippet and sparse imitations become increasingly useful, particularly when the fish are feeding in flat water. A trout that has been rising confidently for half an hour may ignore a fly that drags only slightly across the current. It may also refuse a perfectly respectable imitation simply because it is sitting too high on the surface or differs from the natural insects in some small but important way.

I have always enjoyed that sort of problem. There is something satisfying about finding a good fish, watching it long enough to understand its feeding rhythm and gradually working towards a presentation that it will accept. On some occasions the answer is straightforward. On others, a fish may occupy most of an afternoon without ever coming to the net. Either outcome can make for interesting fishing, provided the angler is prepared to give the trout the attention it deserves.

The atmosphere along the river adds considerably to the appeal. On clear mornings, frost settles across the surrounding paddocks and mist often hangs over the water until the sun reaches the valley floor. The willows have begun shedding their leaves, which collect along the edges of backwaters and occasionally drift through the same feeding lanes we are trying to fish. Cattle stand quietly in the colder paddocks, while wedge-tailed eagles circle above the valley or sit watching from the larger trees.

There is a different quality to the light at this time of year. Shadows reach across the river earlier, and even during fine weather the warmth begins disappearing well before evening. By midafternoon, the temperature can be falling quickly enough that the prospect of a hot shower and a decent meal becomes increasingly attractive. Nevertheless, a trout rising steadily beneath an overhanging willow has a remarkable ability to persuade people to remain on the river longer than they intended.

The approaching spawning season also deserves consideration. By late autumn, some brown trout are beginning to develop their spawning colours, and their behaviour may change as they prepare for winter. As the season progresses, it becomes increasingly important to avoid disturbing fish gathering in spawning areas or occupying suitable gravel. The annual closure of the trout waters exists to protect this part of their life cycle, and it is something I have always regarded as essential to the long-term health of our fisheries.

For guides, the final weeks bring a mixture of satisfaction and fatigue. After months spent preparing boats, guiding clients, watching weather forecasts and organising the countless small details that make up a day on the river, the prospect of a break is not entirely unwelcome. There are mornings when the cold makes another day at the oars considerably less appealing than it would have been six months earlier. Yet once the boat is launched and the river begins moving beneath us, I generally find myself enjoying the day as much as ever.

The past season has provided some exceptional fishing, although not always consistently. There have been periods when the trout were difficult to find and others when a favourable change in conditions produced several memorable days in succession. Looking back, I tend to remember particular sessions rather than an uninterrupted run of good fishing. A worthwhile hatch, an unexpectedly large trout or an afternoon when everything came together after a difficult morning. Vignettes rather than sustained glory, perhaps, but there have been enough of them to make the season memorable.

That variability is something I have become accustomed to after so many years on the Goulburn. It is tempting to judge an entire season by its strongest or weakest periods, but neither gives a particularly complete picture. Water levels, fish populations, insect activity and weather rarely align perfectly for months at a time. The better days can arrive unexpectedly, and a section that appeared almost empty during one drift may produce excellent fishing the next time we visit.

Once the river closes, there will still be plenty to do. Boats and trailers need servicing, equipment requires attention and preparations for the following season begin almost immediately. Winter is also a useful time for teaching. Without the distraction of trying to catch trout, anglers can concentrate on casting, line control, knots and the other fundamentals that are sometimes neglected once they reach the river.

Much of my attention will also turn towards the coming Montana season, while preparations for another New Zealand summer continue in the background. The book I have been working on is approaching completion, although there are still illustrations, editing and the inevitable collection of final details to attend to. Between those commitments, I doubt winter will be particularly quiet.

For now, though, there is still some fishing to be done. A few more drifts, perhaps another worthwhile mayfly hatch and the chance to spend time on sections of river that will soon be closed for the spawning season.

I particularly enjoy the final afternoons when the weather remains settled and there is no reason to hurry. The river is quiet, the light is beginning to soften and occasionally a trout rises in a place that deserves a closer look. We might have spent most of the day fishing already, but there is usually time for one more cast.

At least until the fish stops rising.

Ant

 

 

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