Sunday morning, end of daylight savings, saw us traveling up the F3 freeway towards Hexham for our meeting place. The meeting time was 05:30 to give us time to get to the boat ramp on the Paterson River for sun up. Chris Bannerman, Chris Martin, Steve Tizard and myself arrived at Stockmans before the allotted time and decided we'd have some breakfast whilst we waited for none other than Big Bob and his wife Anne.

The food was good and Bob arrived about 10 after 6….close but no cigar Bob. We headed up through Maitland and turned of towards the little township of Paterson. A 15 minute trek saw us at the ramp ready to launch.

The three boats were slid into the water, cars parked, rods rigged and flies at the ready. We started to move slowly downstream and fished the snags as the sun came up. Steve and I used surface flies to start with and it didn't take long for the first fish to hit my deer hair fly. It was only a small bass of about 23cm, but it was a promising start to the day.

We continued targeting the snags and as with this sort of fishing it didn't take me long to get a fly caught in a willow tree as I tried to get under the overhanging branches. Unfortunately as I tried to flick the fly clear of the branches a loud crack was heard and my 2 piece 8 weight Struddy was now a 3 piece. Not happy Jan! Steve continued to fish whilst I put the 3 piece away and got my 6/7 weight backup out, rigged it up and was ready to start again.

Big Bob came past and hadn't had a hit at this stage. He was fishing deeper flies trying to entice one of the bigger fish out of their little hiding places. The two Chris's hadn't had a touch either and I got the feeling the day was gonna be tough on the fish front.
We all decided to move a 3kms down the river to see if our luck would improve. Steve and I continued with the surface and no hits in about and hour of flicking saw us all head upstream past the town of Paterson.

Again we persisted with the surface flies and had fish come up for a look but no hookups. Chris Bannerman got a herring as we drove past them back towards the ramp. Steve and I continued to fish back to the ramp and I got another hookup on a better fish, but lost it before the boat. We were getting some great casting practice and placing some flies in some really fishy looking spots only to have them come back unscathed. I got a good cast in under a willow tree and was rewarded with another bass of about 25 cm. That was it. The wind picked up a bit and we decided to call it quits and go and get some lunch. The tally for the day was….. Big Bob 2 bass, the biggest going 26cm, Chris Bannerman 1 bass, 1 herring and Chris Martin 1 Bass.

An improvement on our last visit to the Paterson, but still plenty of room for improvement in both fish numbers and size.