Group sinks fish homes

The idea for the structures grew out of several re-stocking initiatives for Lake Benalla, which ultimately proved unsuccessful due to newly stocked fish being attacked by predators or simply swimming downstream.

Saturday was the culmination of months of work researching a solution, designing and making the structures.

TAG member Noel O’Connor, who has been involved with the project since day one, said the group was already starting to see results — only hours after the structures were installed.

‘‘The day went pretty well to plan, we had a little bit of a problem with the motor on the pontoon boat, but we had other boats that could tow it, so it was okay,’’ Mr O’Connor said.

‘‘We had pre-marked the locations on Thursday night using a GPS. We then sunk bricks attached to milk bottles to act as buoys to show where we needed to sink the structures on Saturday.

‘‘So all we had to do was to load up the pontoon boat and drop them in the marked locations.

‘‘Surprisingly some took a little bit longer to sink than others due to the air in the tubes, but they all went down in the end.

‘‘We put in 40. There was four groups of five structures and two clusters of 10. We installed them predominantly from the bridge to the rock-wall, with just the one set of 10 up near the glasshouse opposite the library.

‘‘After we’d installed them all, when we came back to the first structures to move the marker buoys, there was already aquatic life on them.

‘‘The fish-finder on the boats detected that they were being used, and they had only been in for just over an hour at that point.’’

Mr O’Connor said the exercise was made much easier thanks to a lot of help from TAG members, the public and even a couple of local councillors.

‘‘We had great help. We had about 25 people come along on the day,’’ Mr O’Connor said.

‘‘And what was really great is a couple of councillors, Willie van Wersch and Peter Davis came along and gave us a hand.

‘‘We had two privately owned boats and the pontoon boat, which members had brought along.

‘‘We also had a few utes and double trailers to ferry the spider structures down from Benalla signs to the Moira reserve where we were working.

‘‘What was also nice is that we had a lot of interest shown by the public who were around the shore and asked what was going on.

‘‘A couple of people actually asked if they could join up with TAG to be involved with this type of thing in the future.

‘‘We finished the day off with a barbecue and sausage sizzle. It all went really well.’’

●To find out more about the Tatong Anglers Group, visit it on Facebook.