Central North Island - Freshwater
fishing report
April 3, 2024
The great lake is yielding quality catches, with jigging currently favoured by anglers and cooler weather bringing trolling back into play.
The great lake continues to deliver some excellent back end sport with some fine quality fish showing up.
Jigging continues to be the popular method but as the weather cools down you can expect the trolling and harling starting to fish well again. We can already see the thermocline starting to break up as the water cools and are seeing the fish feeding hard out on smelt at varying levels from anything from 20 to 50 meters. There is less boat traffic on the lake so we find that the fish are not being pushed out deeper and further from the shore. April could well be one of the best month this year to fish on the lake.
Fly fishing is in the middle of the seasonal change from summer to winter transition on local spawning waters. We have already had some small squirts of running fish on the last fresh we had a month ago. Some cracking big silver bars were caught on most local rivers providing some great sport for those who were lucky enough to be on the rivers during that short window.
For now though the rivers are now back to very low and clear conditions. There is still good numbers of both resident and spawning fish to be found mainly in the riffles and tails. Success requires adapting to the conditions with extra stealth and longer leaders and smaller flies.
You can still expect the odd mayfly hatch on many rivers during the warmer afternoons and evenings providing the inherent wind plays ball. Don’t put away the dry fly box just yet as plenty of rivers below the plateau are still producing great sport.
River mouths have been fishing really well over the past couple of months as the last of the hot weather. There has also been action during the day time as fish seek the cooler waters that most rips provide.
Again we can expect a little transitional period of fish coming in from relief from the warmer water to fish that are gathering with a thought of running to spawn. The next decent fresh will be interesting.
The smaller lakes continue to fish well as the water cools down and good windy days will really get fish on the chomp as they feed up for a long winter.
Bring on the rain!!
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