The Drive By

We awoke to rain. No surprise as it poured the day before and all through the night. Such is life on the west coast of the south island, New Zealand. The waters near us were up and off color, so we packed up and headed north. As can happen, the rain let up as we drove. The skies remained heavy and the air saturated, but we drove into clear waters under the endless bridges and culverts that line the west coast. We drove quite a distance and came to a single lane bridge the west coast is famous for. Given the weather and that it was mid week, there was nobody around. We slowed the van to a crawl as we crossed the bridge. The water was beautiful. Clear, deep blue. The week prior, we'd driven the same route down island and asked ourselves why we had never stopped at this and a couple of other rivers. Today, we were dead tired as we were at day 39 of having had one day off fishing. It's funny how, for as many many days and rivers you have fished in New Zealand, there are multiples of that to fish yet. Your body needs a break from time to time and with the rain having been pouring down earlier and all night, we'd checked our minds off fishing and were enjoying sitting in the van, on our way to get an ice cream bar and back to visit friends.
But, the rods are always folded over on the bed behind the driver's seat. You just never know. So, we inched along the single lane bridge, looking down at the sandy bottom of this stunning river, white rocks dotting the bottom. I glanced upstream to a tongue of a gravel run. Sure enough, this day would not go with out a fishy encounter. There, mid river, as large, dark brown held at the bottom of the gravel, surfing and ferrying mid river, mid current. Impressive!
The van was parked, the rod assembled. I hopped the guard rail and slid into the river below the bridge. I launched the large dry upstream and the fish stopped holding in the current, allowing itself to drift. It slowly rose as it drift about 22 feet downstream, coming up from about 11 or 12 feet down. It was a large pool. It was a large brown.

The amazing part of it - that 10.25 lb brown wasn't alone. No sooner than releasing the fish, we spotted another giant. AJ was up and she simply flipped the same fly out. Same result, frankly.

The cicadas were absolutely electric in the ponga ferns for the 3 hrs we fished the river.

After several good fish were landed in the 3km above the bridge we fished, the weather found us and the monsoons began - as they often do. Rain falling at 25 to 50mm and hour (1 - 2 inches) for 10 to 18 hrs straight tends to blow rivers out for the afternoon, so we stuck to the original plan. Ice cream and a quick visit with friends. Quite a discovery though. 50+lbs of trout in a few runs after spotting from the hwy bridge. Where else in the world can you do that?

Beech Spring

Amelia & I have a favourite spring creek. If you know beech forests, you understand that they are typically found in hilly, relatively steep mountainous terrain. If you know spring creeks, you know that they typically flow out of the ground in pastoral settings – or at least a ways out from the toe of the slopes that water infiltrates. So, to find a beech forest spring creek is relatively rare, but that’s what we stumbled across a few years ago as we explored a back country west coast river. Our spring creek is very spring influenced but does pick up a few ephemeral, run-off fed fingers. The kick is that for most of its run, it flows under a beech forest canopy and is quite weedy in spots. It’s not a long run either, perhaps 1.5 km of water. And there aren’t fish everywhere but there are a few nice browns, most certainly. This year we’ve fished it once a month and will likely fish it once more before we head home to Canada. On each of our visits, AJ missed one of the largest browns of our trip – likely tipping the scales near double digits. There’s a clip of video that will be on our West Coast Spring Creeks dvd (due out later this year) that shows just how amazing the fish and spring creek is. As it is, this blog post shows how amazing both the setting and fish are. The pongas, tuis, fantails, beech canopy, mosses, and a few browns… it’s a stunning little bit of water. Below, you’ll find some of hour favourite photos of this wee gem.

2 Most Magical

When we run into people in New Zealand, we always tend to listen a great deal more than we talk. We simply mention that we're Canadian fly fishers looking for beautiful waters to fish, not necessarily having the biggest or most fish, just to have a neat experience. Those beautiful moments can happen in a 10 foot wide spring creek, breaking the scene down to one ponga fern and a fantail chirping over our shoulder as we cast to a 4 lb brown, or that beauty can be as in your face on the large scale as a dramatic gorge on a sunny west coast afternoon. When we ran into an outgoing Euro couple, Robin and Liz, he was more than happy to share a few places he thought were beautiful to fly fish. We had  a chance to poke around a couple of streams he mentioned about 2 or 3 weeks later, and over those 2 days Amelia & I experienced an out of world fly fishing experience. Pretty? Stunning. Good fishing? Depends on your definition. Not a lot of fish, but when they average over 8 pounds and you work 12 to 15 fish a day and take them all, you wind up with those magical Tourism New Zealand days. The kind that everyone wants to sell you in magazines but happen once or twice in a 3 month trip. It just so happens we timed the weather and water conditions 'just so'. So, a great big shout out "Thank you" to Robin and Liz who put us on the two small waters where the following shots took place over 2 days. We haven't been back since as they are small waters with a very finite number of fish, but maybe we'll get back before we head home end of Feb. For as great a fishing result we had, the scenery and setting was simply stunning on these waters. Casting in the depths of the gorge on the one stream was magical, freely flowing line set against heavy contrasts of beech, rata, and pongas. To have big browns simply gorging on anything resembling a cicada the size of your thumb was a bonus. Amelia had an amazing run of fish as you'll see below. You can click on the images for a slightly larger version.

We'll update this blog again soon with some other amazing fly fishing experiences - not so much for sizes but beauty and neat, smaller scale intimate fly fishing.