tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

Bright is a small town nestled in north-eastern Victoria. It is a gateway to the snowfields and reknowned for it’s fine food and wine. Of course, being near mountains, there are also ample opportunities for fishing, cycling and good-old-fashioned scrumping. I will now detail the three latter topics in reverse order.

1. Scrumping
Scrumping involves the petty theft of fruits, vegetables and other assorted agricultural products from private land. With the advent of the playstation, scrumping is becoming somewhat of a lost art. Fortunately, timtim is an old hand - forever sussing out potential larders near and far. On this trip we managed to assist in the harvest of plums, rasberries, blackberries and figs. By far the most entertaining scrump occurred at a fig tree just outside Bright, where timtim and lach managed to get caught red-handed with armfuls of beautiful ripe figs.

The owners who discovered them asked, “Who are you”.

“Passers-by” came the reply.

“Do you do this often?”

“From time to time”.

“Well, I think we’ll be having those back”.

At which point lach and timtim cough up what they’re holding, minus what’s in their bag and walk away casually - before breaking into a run and jumping into the waiting get-away vehicles.

2. Cycling

There are 4 major bike rides near Bright, including Mt Hotham, Falls Creek, Tawonga Gap and Mt Buffalo. We were only there for 4 days, so just managed the last two - Mt Buffalo being the most serious. The peak rises some 1200m from the valley floor, with over 20 km of uphill riding and hairpins. The last few kilometres is on gravel, just to make things a bit more difficult. Needless to say, for the amateur cyclist, scaling the mountain is quite an undertaking.

Unless you’re Bob, that is. She decided to try the ride after a few mango daquris the night before. She borrowed Kath’s mountain bike, chucked on some shorts, a t-shirt and some sneakers and up she went - all 29 km and 1200 m to the top. Talk of the town was her defeat of Dunc (see below) - who was riding an $8000 full-carbon fibre LOOK bike.

3. Fishing

The Ovens River flows right through Bright, but was full of silt from bushfires and low on bugs (and therefore fish). So, Dunc and timtim and I headed to Falls Creek, where small streams dissect the alpine meadows and are teeming with bugs (and therefore fish).

Duncan is pretty new to fly-fishing, but has a good cast. Problem is, on these small streams one needs to land the fly in exactly the right place, without spooking the fish, on the first attempt - otherwise it’s off to the next pool. Dunc was very unlucky all day, but learnt a lot about where to cast, what flies to use and so on. Luckily, I managed to catch a few fish, which we smoked and had with a nice drop of white.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 4:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.