Taking my daughter for her first ‘real’ river trout session at Eildon

With rivers in Vic­to­ria about to close for the 2020 win­ter ‘closed sea­son’, and my daugh­ter’s birth­day the same day, we decid­ed to hit the Goul­burn and Rubi­con Rivers near Eil­don for some last-ditch trout.

Anneliese has nev­er fished in the riv­er before, so we had to buy her some waders first. The waders she has in the pho­tos below were the small­est size we could find, and still had to be sub­stan­tial­ly adjust­ed to fit. I guess the fish­ing indus­try isn’t real­ly cater­ing to teenage girls…

We first fished the Goul­burn Riv­er at Gilmore’s Bridge (near Thorn­ton) and then tried our luck in the Rubi­con between Camp Jun­gai and the trout egg farm, and snapped off a large Atlantic salmon that had obvi­ous­ly escaped from the farm and moved up riv­er. We fin­ished the day fish­ing up at the Pondage, after brav­ing the crowds in Eil­don that weren’t even think­ing about social dis­tanc­ing. We caught a nice lit­tle brown trout for din­ner, and had a pret­ty good day together.