As a quote, it just about sums up my attitude
to fishing. "The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit
of what is elusive, but obtainable. A perpetual series of occasions
for hope."
I pay more than lip service to the notion that any
time spent on the water fishing, catching or not, is quality time.
But while fishing is good, catching fish is better.
Most, probably all, fishermen spend most of their
fishing time pursuing their fishing dream. Most of the time, catch
results are less than dream-time sublime. Truly stand out days
are by definition few and far between. When they come around,
I treat them as rare treasure.
Most of my stand out days mixed an extraordinarily
fortunate conjunction of time, place and people, with fish. Dream
fish.
There have been the trips to the legendary, unusual,
and exotic. But these trips have rarely yielded up an extraordinary
mix. Anticipation kept me sleepless days prior. Finally there,
the fishing ranged from very good, to, well, ho-hum. Perhaps the
book and video fed preconceptions overfilled the imagination.
Possibly the lack of truly stand out days, at dream locations,
was because the dream was too far from any real possibility of
reality.
Looking back, most of my stand out fishing days
kind of snuck up on me. Like this one.
I was playing truant, a mid-week pre Labour Weekend
sortie into the Horomanga River, south of Rotorua. All the drive down from Auckland,
my head was full of the 12, nah 15, nah 20 pound fish, sulking in the pools,
waiting for me to arrive. They had been there.
Not any more, they were not.
In a two hour walk up the river, I saw more fishermen
than fish. In the three hour, very tired, many sit downs, walk
out, I saw less fishermen, and less fish. I actually cast to only
three or four fish in the whole slog. I came to believe these
fish had seen many more flies than I have, and I see hundreds
every day.
It was a very tired, tackle shop owner that crawled
into one of Graeme and Joan Ryders bunks at the Aniwhenua Lodge.
Tired, but not now too disappointed.
Over Joan’s dinner, Graeme mentioned that a guided
trip he had booked for the following day had fallen through. Quickly
it was arranged that Graeme and I would fill in the time very
productively, thank you very much, by jet boat fishing the Rangitieki
River below the Aniwhenua Dam.
Sleep came quickly. The combination of Joan’s dinner
giving me a bigger, rounder, happy tummy, extreme tiredness, and
no over-promising by Graeme, soon saw the Sandman’s magic sleep-potion in action.
This bit about over-promising may require some explanation.
Usually before a fishing trip, sleep comes slowly. The fish of
tomorrow keep the brain in high gear, holding sleep at bay. Not
this night. Graeme had done his best not to build too much expectation.
He had explained, there were plenty of fish in the section of
the river we were to fish, but they were not usually big. Three
to four pound fish would be considered good size. A good day could
see five or six fish caught. Five or six weight gear should maximise
the sport.
We hit the river next morning, not too early.
The first thing that struck me about this section
of the river was it’s size. My mind’s eye picture was of a smaller
river, not the willow-lined almost lower-Tongariro sized reality.
Fishing here, involved driving the jet boat up to
a bank, dismounting, and casting out heavy nymphs into the current
joins. Simple enough stuff, if you can cast heavy nymphs on a
five weight.
My heavy nymph casting ability even on heavy gear
is not the best. In fact if I am not the world’s worst heavy nymph
caster I am running a very close second. My heavy nymph casting
turns the immediate vicinity into a hard hat area. Too many of
my casts were going in quite the wrong place to have any chance
of producing fish.
Maybe it was this, that decided me to rig up a sinking
shooting head. It may also have been the marked similarity to
the lower reaches of the Tongariro, one of my favourite haunts
with a sinking line, that helped me reach the re-rig decision.
I tied on one of John Milner’s Paradise Wrigglers,
and fired out a cast. The first.
The line swung down below me, stopped, and shot
sideways. A fish bolted from the water in the first of many jumps.
I meantime doing the dance of the line around my feet fisherman,
trying to play the fish on the line, not the reel. I had discovered
about the same time the fish took the lure, that the spool was
the wrong size for the reel and was in total, backlash threatening
free spool.
Despite my best efforts otherwise, the fish came
to the net, was photographed and released. Ignoring the wrong
sized spool problem I decided to persist.
A few more casts, a couple more fish, a couple and
more lost, then on up the river to more pools and runs.
New pools, more casts, more fish, some landed and
released, more lost. Sometimes on the wet line, less often on
the nymph. My nymph fishing being confined to those situations
where distance and accuracy were not too great an issue. Graeme,
with no casting limitations, caught fish too.
Brave, strong fish these Rangitieki fish. They pulled
and jumped like fish I had not encountered before. Their strength
and stamina disguising their size.
We reached the point, later in the afternoon, when
we had to turn back for home. On the way we came across a wide
stretch of river, bisected by a long, just underwater, shingle
bank.
We anchored the boat in the knee deep water, in
the middle of the bank. I waded out to fish the left side of the
bank, Graeme waded out to the right, now rigged with a sinking
line. Both of us casting from the middle of the river toward our
respective banks.
The fishing had been good, very good, up till this
point, but now a truly stand out day was going to be cemented
into the memory banks.
On his first cast, as the line swung into the area
where the river rejoined itself, Graeme hooked up. A few casts
later so did I. So it continued. At any one time either Graeme
or I was hooked up.
We released all the fish that we managed to land,
but many fish made the release decision for us.
My enduring memory of this particular session will
not be the number of fish hooked, played and sometimes landed,
and there were plenty, but of the fighting quality of each fish.
At one point Graeme was onto a fish that just would
not stop jumping. He was holding the rod in one hand, his camera
in the other, trying to capture a jump shot. Graeme’s efforts
were fruitless, but he had an incredible number of opportunities.
Diminishing time finally bought the session, and
the day, to an end.
I was utterly rapt. I had landed and released over
a dozen fish, I had played many more. Graeme was rapt. He at least
equalled my catch efforts. He was also rapt about fishing this
stretch of the river with a wet line. His fishing here was dominated
to the point of exclusion by nymphing. The change of method, not
only produced fish, but a change that was as good as a rest.
This was a truly stand out day. A day that reinforced
my growing belief that truly stand out days happen along when
expectation is not at it’s highest.