Tommy Time has been chasing Australian salmonids on his YouTube channel for years, but on a trip uploaded this morning the host appeared to find the river he'd been looking for. Standing in the upper reaches of a Snowy Mountains stream, with snow on the high peaks and fish stacked in the runs below, he could barely keep his voice down.
"Good day, folks. We are in the mighty Snowy Mountains here and this is my first time here and I'm absolutely blown away. This place is absolutely stunning," Tommy said in the opening sequence, posted on 17 May 2026. "We're on the spawn run here. It's a really exciting time of the year for these brown trout to run up the river here and do their thing."
The conditions were a gamble. A heavy rain band early in the week had blown the system out, and the trip fell five days into a slow drop. "There's still a bit of fly," Tommy said, eyeing the water colour. "I'm still very optimistic."
His rig was straightforward fly-fishing for running browns: a 4X leader, a nine-foot tippet, an Oros float indicator, a glow-bug fly tied as an egg pattern, an unweighted dropper bead acting as an attractor in the middle of the rig, and a euro-style nymph on the point. The nymph hook is turned up so it skips bottom snags. "It's not really going to get caught in the bottom as much because that hook's nice and turned up," he explained.
The first serious fish came on the egg pattern. "Felt like a snag, and it just took off," he said as the trout doubled the six-weight over. "This could be my best fish on the fly. I tell you now, it is." The fish was netted, photographed and released — a stretched, river-coloured Eucumbene brown that Tommy called his personal best on the long rod.
Further up the run his fishing partner Ken began sight-fishing pods of stacked spawners with the indicator off and a bead-headed nymph drifted past their noses. "He's just been spotting them with the torch, dropping it in front of them," Tommy said of the early-morning session. The pair quickly found themselves in front of fish in the four- to five-pound class. "There's like one, two, three. They're all like two, three, four, five pound each," Ken called from the bank.
The stand-out fish of the day came from a cut bank where Ken talked Tommy into a low-profile bow-and-arrow cast onto a visible fish. "I'm so psyched with that. That is awesome," Tommy said as Ken slid the net under it. "This is like New Zealand stuff here, mate."
The pair worked through black nymphs and glow bugs in rotation, picking off browns and the occasional rainbow that Tommy initially mistook for a pale brown. "Oh, that's a really light coloured brown," he said before correcting himself. "What a session this is turning into."
The trip closed with Tommy walking the bank, snow on the ridge behind him, already planning the return. "You can be moving the snow, man. This place is absolutely unbelievable," he said. "I've absolutely had a ball. The boys on the spin gear are doing pretty well — they've caught more fish than me, but that's fine. I've caught a great number of fish on the fly for me. I will be back. Cannot wait to come back here, maybe next year."