Most would regard recent visits to Copeton by media fishing personality Steve Starling with his wife Jo and the King and Queen of Copeton competition running until November 31 as positives for the town. 

Self-confessed fishing tragic, John Drew, does.

“Copeton is great for the Inverell district. It gets people travelling and they’re all spending money in the area,” Drew said.

“And just keeping in mind that Inverell has a lot of fishing waters, within an hour’s drive you’ve got Pindari, Copeton and further south Split Rock. With all the rivers thrown in there, it’s a very big freshwater population. 

“Just to the east we have trout in the hills, out to Cod in the waters around Inverell. So the amount of freshwater species people can chase from Inverell is more than a lot of other places in NSW.”

Another keen local angler is Alex Ribeiro and his assessment of Copeton went slightly further

“I’ve been fishing in the Macquarie River in Dubbo, I’ve done a bit of freshwater fishing around NSW and I’d have to say that Copeton Dam is one of the prestige areas to be fishing for Murray Cod,” he said.

“People are catching quite large Cod, over the metre, and that’s listed as a trophy fish.

“Now is an excellent time of the year for Cod fishing off the surface very early in the morning, using spinner baits and divers.”

Drew agreed

“A lot of the old-timers will tell you that the larger Murray Cod tend to come about more when the water temperature has dropped. And there have been some very large fish caught in recent times,” he said.

“A lot of anglers are using the surface poppers as it gets late in the evening and early morning, and there are some good fish coming in on spinner baits and then the deeper lures.”

“I think the biggest one I’ve seen was 116cm – 120cm.”

Drew said another local advantage was that while other waterways were closed for the breeding season from September 1 – November 30, Copeton was not.