The blackwater’s well gone, but the after-effects look like haunting the affected areas for years to come.

The ball park area of concern is roughly from Boundary Bend to Renmark.

I’ve spoken to a couple of people in the know, and they’re saying there hasn’t been a Murray cod caught in that area since.

This is an area famous for its big cod; it’s an area keen fishos from our area and all over Australia used to head for to target big fish over that magic metre mark.

The past few months would have seen hundreds of fishos having a crack.

No big cod being caught is no fun for the fishos themselves, but it’s an absolute disaster for all those towns that have tourism as a major source of income along that stretch.

We not only lost all those really old big breeding fish across hundreds of kilometres but lost a major predator.

Now the effects of that are there for everyone to see.

Carp bred like crazy during those high water levels and they did not seem to have a problem with the blackwater and now, with no cod to keep them under control, have absolutely exploded in number.

There are literally millions of carp in the 100mm to 250mm range everywhere, each and every one busy smashing all other aquatic life they can fit in their bellies.

The other thing is the added angling pressure on areas that still have decent numbers of cod.

It’ll be interesting to see how long it’ll take that section of river to come back.

But when you consider how old those big old ones would have been, I’m pretty sure it could be counted in decades before we get many monsters again. Very sad.

Eucumbene/Jindabyne – I’ve been a bit slack on mentioning these two lately, mainly because we haven’t had too many reports.

The reports we’re getting now though indicate things aren’t going too bad.

Both Euc and Jindy have been producing a few on the troll, mainly down a bit though.

There’s also a few being picked up off the bank despite both lakes dropping a bit.

The pick of the Snowy lakes, though, is apparently Tantangara.

Quite a few reports have filtered through of some nice trout on bait, fly and on the troll, despite it dropping a slowly too.

Talbingo – been OK on the reddies with an occasional trout coming in with yabbies and soft plastics best.

Blowering – still really firing on the redfin front, but even though they’re a little bigger than most fish coming out of Lake Hume, they’re not monsters.

A few decent cod are being trolled up or angled from the bank though.