No Sign Of Coleridge “Monster”

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 1

No Sign Of Coleridge “Monster”

In the unplumbed depths of Lake Coleridge lurks a fish of monstrous size that lives on 201 b salmon and expensive fishing tackle. That is the story fisheries scientists surveying the lake have been hearing from veteran anglers.

Some say the monster is a giant catfish—a 2001 b whopper kidnapped in the Mississippi river as a stripling and liberated in Lake Coleridge many years ago. So far Mr M. Flain, the Marine Department’s scientific officer, has seen no sign of it in all his diving, netting, and echo-sounding of the lake. But he has recorded a mysterious echo in one of the deeper parts of the lake. It happened while Mr Flain was towing a net to catch plankton over a part of Lake Coleridge which he knew to be more than 360 ft deep. His echo-sounder was set on its 120 ft range, and it began to trace an echo line at a depth of 60ft. It was a fuzzy line, quite unlike the sharp black mark which would be recorded off the bottom, and it continued for nearly 300 yatds, rising to 30ft before it petered out Could this be the Lake Coleridge monster? Mr Flain thinks not His theory is much more prosaic, although he does concede that it is just a theory. “It might be a shoal of lake galaxids,” he said. "They’re

a native fish of the whitebait family, and of the whitebait order of size. “They are known to be present in the lake, and if so—and if they do shoal—the other fish could be feeding on them. This would mean-that the fishing could be good in the middle of the lake. At present most of the trawling is done around the edges.” It is with the object of helping to improve the fishing in Lake Coleridge that Mr Flain and his technical field officers are making their intensive study of the lake itself, the fish in it, and the results of angling there. Already the creel census is well on the way, although the census takers have been so busy counting catches that they have not had time to add up the figures. Mr J. Wing, one of the technical field officers, has noted that most of the fish have been in excellent condition, and he has seen three limit bags of salmon. He said that 90 per cent of the fish caught bad been quinnat salmon, 9 per cent were rainbow trout, and only 1 per cent brown trout.

Rear-Admiral G. J. Dufek, former commander of the American Antarctic operation, were there with a fishing party on Wednesday, and according to Mr Wing’s creel census the party caught 12 salmon. The fact that Mr Jackson McGowan, vice-president of the Douglas Aircraft Company, fell in the lake was not considered of sufficient scien-

tific importance to be noted in the records. Mr Wing said he had had good co-operation from anglers, particularly on 'opening day, when their hospitality tended to hamper the progress of the census. Most seemed to have caught some fish, and most of the fishing was done between daybreak and 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. Analysis of information collected about the lake would probably show whether they were right to concentrate on that time of day and on favoured fishing spots.

Mr Flain’s studies have shown that the thermocline—an abrupt change in water temperature—is unlikely to occur at Lake Coleridge. "The weather is nearly continuously north-west,” he said.

“and the constant wind keeps the water circulating." He has recorded a maximum depth of 820 ft off Scamander Bay so far, but the new echo-sounder which he has just ordered will produce more accurate figures than those achieved with the plumb-line. It will also have a rotating transducer which will be able to scan ahead and pick up individual fish. Mr Flain is taking crossreadings to produce a complete profile of the lake, and he has already proved that a “mountain range” reputed to be under the surface between the small island and Ryton Bay is in fact there. Echosoundings have shown twin ridges 90ft high, with their tops 100 ft below the lake surface.