Tommy Time has fished the bulk of Australia's better trout fisheries on his YouTube channel, but on a session uploaded this morning he made his first trip to the upper Snowy Mountains — and walked away with what he called the biggest brown trout he has ever landed on the fly.
"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," the host said in the opening shot of the 17 May 2026 video. "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 timing was fragile. A heavy rain band had blown the river out at the start of the week, and the pair were fishing the back end of a slow drop five days later. The water still had a tinge of colour. "There's still a bit of fly," Tommy said. "I'm still very optimistic."
His rig was a textbook spawn-run setup for a six-weight: 4X leader, nine-foot tippet, an Oros indicator, a glow-bug egg fly on the dropper, an unweighted bead acting as a hookless attractor in the middle, and a euro-style nymph on the point. The nymph hook is turned up so it skips bottom snags instead of catching them. "It's not really going to get caught in the bottom as much because that hook's nice and turned up," he said.
The egg pattern did the early work. The fish that turned out to be Tommy's personal best ate the glow bug subtly enough that he initially thought he was stuck. "Felt like a snag," he said. "And it just took off. I was like, OK." The fight ran on the six-weight for a couple of minutes before the trout — a kype-jawed, river-coloured Eucumbene brown — was slid into the net. "This could be my best fish on the fly. I tell you now, it is."
His partner Ken switched to sight-fishing pods with a single nymph and a head torch as soon as the light came up. "He's just been spotting them with the torch, dropping it in front of them," Tommy said. They were quickly looking down at 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.
The trip's standout moment came from an undercut bank where Tommy had to drop low and execute a bow-and-arrow cast onto a visible fish before it spooked. Ken slid the net under it. "You might have this twenty bucks, mate. That is definitely the biggest fish of the trip," he said. Tommy could barely get the words out. "I'm so psyched with that. That is awesome."
The pair rotated between black nymphs and glow bugs across the morning, picking off browns and a couple of rainbows Tommy initially mistook for pale browns. "Oh, that's a really light coloured brown," he said before correcting himself. "What a session this is turning into."
The video signed off with Tommy walking the bank, snow on the peaks above him, already mapping the next trip. "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."