Lake Lonsdale

Welcome to the Lake Lonsdale Fishing Guide. Lake Fyans is a 2.5-hour drive from Melbourne, past Ballarat and Horsham heading towards Stawell. Roughly a 10-minute drive from the Grampians National Park and Halls Gap. A beautiful country setting along the picturesque mountains of Halls Gap and the Grampians. Lake Lonsdale provides exceptional year-round fishing for large redfin. The lake has a beautiful backdrop of the picturesque mountains of the Grampians. It has plenty of structure and that’s why fish are thriving and growing to great sizes here.

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Things to do at Lake Lonsdale

This is a good location to take the family and unplug in a beautiful country setting. There are several good accommodation spots and you are close to Halls Gap and Stawell. Nearby attraction includes halls gap zoo, Mackenzies Falls, Silverband Falls, Venus loop walks, Grampians helicopter flights, wine tours, rock climbing, and bushwalking. This whole area is great for fishing, it’s not just Lake Fyans but you also have surrounding lakes including Lake Bellfield, Rocklands Reservoir, Lake Lonsdale and Wartook Reservoir

Fishing Lake Lonsdale

At Lake Fyans you can catch

• Redfin
• Trout
• Yellowbelly ( Golden Perch )

Lake Lonsdale is a great destination to catch a trophy-size redfin. Over the years we have seen many refind caught over 50cms. It’s a shallow system with clean water that has many snags, timber trees and weed beds home to brown trout and, rainbow trout as well as redfin, and tench.  It’s a prime location to fish with a kayak or small boat whilst there is an extensive sandy beach for land-based anglers and unbelievable potential for those who enjoy fly fishing. Land-based fishing can be a tad challenging as it is very shallow and often weedy from the banks. When fishing from a boat or kayak concentrate your time and effort casting lures towards visible structure and depth changes. Many of the largest fish are often caught amongst the timber. The trick here is to present a lure or soft plastic in close and tempt the bigger ones out of the structure they are residing in for a reaction strike.

Trolling is a popular fishing technique here. Working shallow/mid diving lures and even soft plastics along the edges of any visible structure. This can be done on a small boat or even a kayak. Lures of plastics with bright flashing colours or that make sound work really well.

Historically water levels have been quite low but this hasn’t prevented the system from fishing well. When the water levels are up fishing from the banks can be very good. Some helpful fishing tips to keep in mind when fishing at Lake Lonsdale include using your sounder to monitor temperature changes as redfin will generally stick to zones that are a degree or two warmer. This is often along the edges or shallow weed lines and we generally concentrate our time casting towards the banks as opposed to fishing the middle deeper areas. Also when using your sounder keep an eye on depth changes, weed lines and any visible structure which is often where schools of redfin will reside. Trout and Redfin are notorious for feeding more heavily at Dawn and Dusk. My personal favourite is fishing the sundown.

Watch this video of FishingMad fishing the Grampians

Lake Lonsdale Gear selection

Good gear selection here would include a 2-4 or 2-5 kilo spin rod coupled with a 2000 or 2500 size reel spooled with 4-8-pound braid and equivalent fluorocarbon leader. Nice and light to enjoy the experience but heavy enough to land a good size fish as there are plenty of good ones in this system. If you intend to flick bigger chatter baits and swimbaits you can also use a light baitcast outfit.

Trolling Tassie Devils, stump jumpers and minnow imitations such as the Daiwa double clutch at different depths is a great way to fish Lake Fyans. We have also had great success fishing with a range of soft plastics & lures. Click here to see our best lures & plastics to catch redfin. If bait fishing Mudeye, live minnow and power bait on a float is a great choice when targeting trout. Other good options include scrub worms and yabbies. I would do so using a very simple running sinker rig with a small hook or treble, and a small pea size sinker. Berleying an isolated area and fishing in that one spot is also a great idea when bait fishing.

Fishing the Grampians – Here are some great fishing locations in the surrounding area.

You may also want to try these fantastic fishing locations which aren’t too far away including,

• Lake Fyans
• Lake Bellfield
• Wartook Reservoir
• Rocklands Reservoir
• Green Hill Lake Ararat 
• Lake Bolac
• Wimmera River
• Glenelg River
• Lake Hamilton
• Lake Toolondo