Anyone who gets out there a bit knows that Hume hasn't been recognised as a big numbers lake for many seasons now. More than one in a session means you've had a great day.

There are always exceptions though, like Ross and Jamie who recently put out a great clip of themselves picking up four rippers in a six-hour session. But the reality is that that doesn't happen all that often.

There's heaps of complexities when trolling for trout, but let's just cover a few fundamentals.

Depth, speed and colour are the three basics we all have to try and get right, and in my opinion I've listed them in order of importance too.

It's no good trolling your favourite lure at one metre if your sounder's showing the bulk of fish are feeding at seven metres. Which seems to be the case on Hume at the moment - and while there's been a lot of trout trolled flat lining winged lures and trolling divers such as McGraths, sometimes you've just gotta get that bit deeper.

Speed can also make or break your day.

Most quality minnow-style lures will give a good action and can catch fish at most speeds, but it's only when you crank it up a bit that you'll sort out which ones need a slight tune and which ones just can't handle the pace. Speed is critical as far as getting the fish to have a crack and also to ensure your winged lures are working properly.

Drop your winged lure over the side, giving it about 3 metres from the rod tip, then keep bumping up your speed until the lure starts to completely rotate, then back off a poofteenth.

You'll find that different brands will work at their best at different speeds. As a general guide though, I'd say winged lures give their best actions between 2.5 to 4km/h depending on brand.

If your line's twisting badly, that's a pretty good indicator you're going too fast.

Colour - well, we could fill this whole paper with theories and arguments of one over another. And, as I said earlier, I believe colour is the least important of the three things we're discussing.

In saying all that, that doesn't stop me having my favourites.

On Lake Hume, silvers and pinks are always popular, probably because of the fact that just about every boat on the lake has at least one silver or pink lure hanging out the back.

It's very important to remember not all fish are at a given depth at the same time, not every fish will attack lures furiously at one given speed and one particular colour is not always the silver bullet.

There are always going to be contradictions - all we're trying to do is maximise our chances.

Dartmouth (63.02 per cent) - seems to have picked up a little, with one customer reporting 10 nice fish in an overnight trip. Most were caught flat lining early morning on winged lures in gold colours.

The Dartmouth Anglers and Commercial Club fishing section also had a comp up there last weekend and some nice fish were landed. Dart won the comp with their best 10 fish weighing in around the 12kg mark, a great average.

Quite a few were from Lake Binamboola, which has been pretty reasonable of late.

Hume (25 per cent) - has been pretty tough, but there's still been some very nice trout showing up.

Most are being caught on winged lures fished at a variety of depths. There's also been a few caught on deeper divers. That'll also give you a chance of catching a yella or cod, which are showing up very occasionally.

There's been a couple of cod caught on bait up around the Wymah area of late, too.

Crays - are still going gangbusters everywhere, by the sounds of it.

Blowering (45.8 per cent) - has been reasonable despite the crappy weather we've been getting. A 1.03-metre cod caught by Brendan Spinks on Wednesday was one of quite a few we've heard of this week.

Brendan caught his fish trolling a custom crafted Jaws lure.

The yellas and reddies remain pretty quiet, though.

Eildon (37.9 per cent) - fished reasonably again this week for trout, with a few being trolled on a variety of coloured winged lures in our report from the Goughs Bay area.

Also, the odd good cod's being trolled up and cast around the wall.

Snowy Lakes - are still pretty tough although I did get one good report from Eucumbene where one fisho landed close to 30 on bait off the bank last week. That's the best report from up that way for a while.

All lakes have risen slightly this week, so let's hope that's a sign of things to come.