The 10lb. Trout
As I sit in the winter deep freeze in Banff, Ab I ponder the next move to make…the next river to fish.
Fast forward 10 months and my long-time girlfriend and I are boarding a plane; final destination, Auckland, NZ the infamous place of gin clear water and football size trout.
After months of pontificating, day dreaming and researching, the time to fly had come at last. Was I going to take the first fish on a streamer? Dry? Was I going to be fishing small, cramped high country streams hemmed in with grabby bushes and trees or in a large meandering river in the middle of a sparse valley? Did I need more hackle? More Zonker strips? All these questions and more were fiercely competing for my limited attention span when Grace and I finally realized there was a more pressing matter at hand. Where do we go when we land!? Step 1: find accommodation.
Let me digress a little bit and inform you how Grace and I seem to work. Some call us Adventurous, I call us Stupid. One of our favourite things to do is to fly to foreign lands and arrive with no hotel reservations, no airport transfer booked, no currency or no real idea in general and see if it works out (Spoiler: It has worked out so far). With the help and patience of a few Auckland locals and a couple people at the SPARK telephone company we were hooked up with NZ phone numbers and were doing the accommodation research we should have done weeks earlier!
First problem solved; we had a campground booked and a place to get our feet wet as we got used to things on the other side of the world.
Fast forward three days…
We had been enjoying the beginning stages of our vacation but we still had a nagging feeling like we were missing something; we still hadn’t caught a trout! Step 2: buy a car. Grace and I spent the better part of a holiday Monday scouring the internet for a trusty-looking steed that would squire us and our belongings to the places we had dreamed of. Needless to say, nothing lived up to this wondrous, almost magical vehicle we had dreamed up. Instead, we settled to test drive an older, but in good shape, `92 Mitsubishi Eterna. This beautiful, Japanese mid-size sedan with a 2L V6 engine and no cup holders but 12 ashtrays (the 90`s in Japan must have been fun) was just the specimen to take us one step closer to our dream of the 10 lb trout. We christened her Sandy and were off to Rotorua that afternoon.
Rotorua is a beautiful little city a few hours drive from Auckland and is well known for its geothermal activity and adventure tourism. We found a nice DOC (department of conservation) campsite maybe 30ks from town, which was situated on a small lake, and broke out the fishing flies for the long anticipated first time. The first day of fishing was almost perfect; sun shining, low wind, delicious nz wine, perfect scenery, but no fish. The high in the sky sun and the warm waters kept the fish in the depths and away from the gradually sloping shoreline. Step 3: Catch a (Big) fish.
After being shut-out in the lakes near Rotorua, grace and I decided to head further south into Te Urewere National Park and try our luck there. Te Uwere N.P. is a very wild place and is reminiscent of how NZ would look before human habitation. A mountainous rainforest, the canopy is thick and the copious amounts of bird life make it sound like Jurassic Park has come to life. Being a Rainforest, this means that there is always an abundance of clean, clear water running down the slopes and into the countless rivers and creeks that snake their way through the natural cracks and crevices that form over time.
We felt that finally we were in the land of the big trout and gin-clear water, but how to find the fish in all this water seemed a daunting task. The first day in Te Uwere, Grace and I stopped at many rivers and just fished for 10-20 minutes at each one, swinging streamers and hoping for the best. No love. The following day, after more mountain passes, we encountered a bigger, slower river than we had encountered previously. We put the rods together and decided to give this river the old `college try`, for this would be the place a big trout would live.
I had just finished swingning my streamer and was stripping it up the near bank when, SLAM, a big old fish hammers my sparse, elk hair lure. The huge strike from this small river took me fully by surprise and I proceeded to make every rookie mistake in the book. Eventually my combination of not paying enough attention and trying to muscle the fish in led to the spitting of the hook and the sorrow of the angler. Step 4: Land big fish.
Never the ones to sit still, we kept moving. After going through Te Uwere and staying with an amazing family in Putere for 8 days, we had managed to wrangle up some nice, scrappy smaller fish and a couple break offs but no `big mama` yet. We were slowly learning that the 10lb trout would be anything but ‘a piece of cake’.
Eventually, Grace and I made our way to a beautiful campsite in the mountains, inland of Napier/Hastings. The first day, we pulled into camp in the late afternoon, we were hungry and tired but managed to set the rods up for the night bite. We proceeded to the river, which was only 30 meters or so from camp and then up to the first pool, which was only 50 meters beyond that when lo and behold; five of the biggest rainbows I have ever seen in the same place. We had hit the mother lode! That night, we successfully managed to spook seven large trout in the span of one hour; Amazing.
Now, the river we were fishing was quite peculiar. The majority of the river is composed of semi-wide, shallow runs interspersed with deep, cavernous pools up to 10 meters deep. Inevitably, 95% of the river was fishless, but in every pool there was at least one trout of at least five pounds. Incredible. Furthermore, this type of river has very little disturbance in the surface water and irregular looking objects are spotted by the observant trout almost immediately. This means, leave the size 12 stonefly and the thingamabobber in your case, small delicate presentations are needed here.
We fished the river hard for three full days and the only thing we had to show for it were broken leaders and sunburns. Apparently the flies I had tied back in Canada were of little appeal to the picky NZ trout, so I went to the vise and tied ever smaller and more sparsely. We went back into town to grab some friends, food and booze then proceeded directly back to the river to continue the chase of the 10 lb trout. Armed with some newly tied Sz. 18 CDC dries and the smallest Hare & Coppers I could manage, I tied my hopper dropper rig and set out once more.
When we returned, I headed straight for the second pool upstream from our campsite where I knew a snaky figure lay in wait. The water here flowed down a steep series of rocks, runs straight into a vertical rock wall and is then forced ninety degrees left, gradually becoming more shallow and sandy until the river returns to its semi-wide run state. In my previous days fishing the river I had learned that a nice-sized fish liked to lay in wait along the vertical wall about halfway between the deep and shallow water.
I blind-cast my newly green fly line (the yellow was too bright, so I used blue permanent marker to make it green) with my 18 foot tapered leader and my two newly tied, sparse flies up into the current. The small Hare & Copper landed silently in the water and the CDC rode high and dry. Only an instant after the flies hit the water, a nose effortlessly broke the water and sucked in the dry fly. The fight was on. I played this fish in a much more controlled and methodical manner using the rod to absorb the fish es sharp pulls and change of direction, maintaining my focus and letting the trout tell you when she’s ready to be netted.
My first 10 lb trout came after almost a year of planning, saving working, practicing and everything else that was involved in this process. It was a journey, a learning experience and a privilege. It is my hope that areas like these, all over the globe, can be preserved for all to enjoy.
