Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Respite & Catch up

It is hard to believe we're this close to coming home. A week to go after 11 full weeks on the go, fly fishing New Zealand's South Isl. It has been a marvellous trip. Frankly, however, we're tuckered out. Literally fishing 7 of every 8 days, much camping, much walking, a lot of eye strain while sight fishing. A heck of a trip, but knackered as of today. With a week to go, I'm not sure how much fishing we'll do this week vs doing some filming of scenes for a couple of projects on the go, visiting friends, and letting the body recover. 3 months on the go at 8 to 14 hrs on the water each day, camping the back country... about cooked.

Let's catch up a wee bit though. Frankly, we haven't posted any photos from late Dec through mid Feb. When you're in the back country full time and come out for food, a shower, and a quick email check, time to update the blog and Facebook is at a premium.

Here's a few pics from a fun day we spent on a west coast river. It's off the coast highway and it looked like it has fish, so we decided to give it a go back mid December. We began at the bridge, headed upstream. The water was inviting, clear and nice pools. We saw no sign of fish as we went up, but the water was so intriguing we couldn't help it. But, as often happens when exploring, we found ourselves in trouble yet again. The river kept getting steeper. The rocks getting bigger. The drops higher. The walking on giant logs of beech trees got a wee bit tougher.



It was about the time that we were scaling over one such boulder and tucking under a log to pull ourselves up over the next boulder, having not seen a fish in 2 hrs of clammering and stammering the gorge that we decided to bail out. Looking for a way out of a gorge other than the way in isn't so easy. We spotted a track high above, but how to get there would present an issue. Stupidly, I decided I could pull myself up a sheer rock face to a plateau, then pull AJ up to me before scaling up to the track, and hope it led us out. Plausible, until as I was pulling myself up the first rock wall the bit I was holding onto let go and I slid down the rock wall 3 or 4 feet, losing a finger nail and scraping the hell out of my hand and arm. Like a good fly fisher, I'd rather wreck an arm than let go of the fly rod so I could steady myself. About then AJ piped up that we could have gone 20 feet to the right and come up a nice grassy trough right to the track. Easier, indeed.

We returned to the van and drove downstream of the bridge to the viewpoint high above where the small river reached the Tasman Sea. Beautiful, but we had to get a better camera view, walking back down the highway. And of course, when you spend your morning trying to kill yourself in the gorge, lose a finger nail, and then walk the highway looking for a camera friendly viewpoint is when you see the only 2 fish of the day, 200m above the Sea. So, back to the bridge, walk downstream, and drift HUGE cicadas over the snout of the fish you saw from high above. Go figure.



No comments:

Post a Comment