By Mike Sayle, with Photography by Jared Goedhart

There is a distinct autumnal quality to things this month in New Zealand, even as spring starts to arrive in North America. I celebrated this by digging out my waders for the first time since November, for a trip up the Waitahanui. It's been some time since I had a bush bashing expedition and I was just in the mood to explore.

I followed an over grown track I had noticed some weeks earlier and eventually came to a gap between two huge flax bushes on a swift section of the river. Ever one to do things the hard way, I climbed into the river and fought my way upstream. After a fair amount of straining against the current I found a pair of small islands in tandem, over grown vegetation covering them and the banks. It was almost impossible to cast there, and even if I had connected to one of the three or four good sized fish I could see milling about in the eddies of the islands, there was no room to fight them anyway.
What was interesting was that the road was only yards from the river, while I watched the fish, several cars drove past without the slightest clue I was there.

I toyed with the idea of bring a “brush slasher” back at some point and clearing away some of the worst obstacles to casting, but even had I done so, it would still have been a tight piece of water. In the end I decided to leave it to the trout.

Later I visited Poutu Stream, a place I had never fished before. A delightful stream, it runs almost parallel to the main highway screened behind masses of blackberry and toitoi. I listened to the traffic roar past as I loaded up my rod with a new Garcia Diplomat 68 fly reel I’d just got for my birthday, and climbed into the river.

Only yards from the where the car was parked was a step in the river that formed a perfect pool for me to try out my new reel . A medium weight hare and copper towed a tiny orange glo-bug as I cast for distance, the reel making a barely audible whisper as I stripped line off. The first cast landed under some overhanging trees on the far side, the second landed in the swift middle and was briskly washed back to me, the third was squarely on the demarcation line of the current and the back eddy of a large rock sitting on the water's edge. I watched the marker turn and bob in the water as the sun warmed my back and unseen traffic zoomed past a hundred yards away. As I watched, it sank no more than a finger's width and halted it's drift. A completely reflexive twitch of rod and line and the butt of my rod vibrated then shuddered and nodded as the trout felt the hook bite in. Several minutes and several leaps later, a nice jack of four pounds came to the net, the hare and copper holding on by a tiny flap of skin. Happy
Birthday!

Another day and another trip to the Poutu Stream. A couple of days steady rain in the middle of the week had finally provided the schooling fish a reason to move into the rivers and I had high hopes for my expedition. The drive down to Turangi is pleasant and the Tongariro car parks are chocka with fishermen's cars. Leaving the car in the Dreadnought pool car park I walked down to the river to be greeted with the sight of whole row of fishermen in the river, five in the water and several more on the river bank. I was happy to leave them to it as I started up the stream from where it ran into the much larger Tongariro. Fast and flowing and not easy to fish, I saw several trout in inaccessible places and lost several flies trying to get to them, the masses of blackberry claiming most and fallen timber getting the rest.

One interesting event. Some way up I stopped a good sized trout holding a weaving station in two feet of water right on the downstream edge of a patch of sunshine the size of a coffee table. As I watched, the trout held right on the line of shade and weaved back and forth, his white mouth opening and closing. That the fish was actively feeding was beyond doubt, now all I had to do was get my flies to the far edge of the sun patch. What entranced me was the fact that the fish always stayed in the shadow, nose pressed to the very edge of the light. It was using the bright patch to spot bugs drifting down on the current and I wondered about the number of times I had see just this type of sun on the water and never thought to look immediately below.

As is my custom, I let the line trail away below me instead of casting for distance, then fired the whole lot up stream. The trout made a definite jink as the line landed next to him, but continued to feed. Down drifted my line, the nymphs drifting through the sun patch....Nothing. A minute watching the fish feed, then cast again. Again the fish jinked as the line landed a few feet away, but again continued to feed. Again nothing.

Third cast was sent on it's way with an extra 6 feet of line, maybe my nymphs were not sinking enough to be attractive. Picking the weight of flies is a delicate balance of sinking to the bottom as quickly as possible, but not being so heavy as to either stick on the bottom or only drift slowly, pulled along by the resistance of the line in the water. Ideally your marker should drift at the same speed as the water, but be twitching occasionally as the nymphs bump along the bottom.

Hardly had my line hit the water when it stuck solid. Great! I stood perfectly still to see if it had just snagged a bit of moss or weed and would come away by itself. No. I didn’t want to yank it loose, and risk scaring the trout. I slowly eased line in to see if I could gently unstick it. As tension came on the line, my marker eased sideways in the current no more than a foot... Snag nothing, this was a fish! It must have grabbed one of the nymphs almost as soon as they hit the water, then resumed its place on the bottom.

For several minutes I had been connected to a fish holding just above the one I had been watching and not known it. As soon as I put tension on the line, it bolted up stream. A brief but scrappy fight later I landed a darkish jack of just over 3 pounds. The last I saw of the big fish I’d been casting to was a large slab-like tail disappearing under some overhanging bushes.

END NOTE: Mike Sayle is writing a series of articles on fishing for a year in Taupo, just to remind the rest of us what we’re missing by not living in New Zealand. Jared Goedhart is a photographer that works at Sporting Life in Turangi they can be found on the web at http://www.sportinglife-turangi.co.nz