He said the relatively calm New Year behaviour of recent years was also a result of a management plan which had been in force for the past three years to stem unruly behaviour.

“The first year (2010) we weren’t open to day visitors,” he said.

But last year and this year had seen a slight relaxation of the rule: day visitors were allowed in but had to leave by 4pm.

This plan, combined with a modest presence of police and security guards, had worked wonders to curb antisocial behaviour yesterday, Mr Taylor said.

“We’ve had a good day ... we’ve had no issues,” he said.

Weather conditions were brilliant and about 200 day-visitor cars were in the park.

“No wind, plenty of waterskiers (but) no big reports of fish,” Mr Taylor said.

But he said the lack of fish-catching reports was more likely due to fishermen’s tendency to keep a good spot secret rather than not many fish being caught.

Plenty of families were enjoying the dam.

“Most of them just come out for a nice, relaxing evening,” Mr Taylor said.

The water park for the children was busy – “going nuts”, as he put it, despite the main water pump limping along and not working properly.

“It’s still working but not running at full capacity – but we’ll have a local company out here on Wednesday morning to fix it,” Mr Taylor said. 

With the dam’s capacity at 63 per cent, boaters should be careful as trees and logs, particularly at the river end, were starting to poke up though the surface.

He said State Water had been releasing up to 3000 megalitres a day for irrigation purposes for the past six weeks which meant the dam’s level had dropped by nearly a third in that time.