Career Day

We ventured to the Oreti River, which is notorious for big fish.  We met up with a guy we met when we were fishing near the Mavora lakes, Jeff, and he took us to where he had fished previously on the Oreti.  This stretch gets hammered pretty good, leading to very spooky and for lack of a better word, smart fish.  The weather forecast read "fine" which in New Zealand means sunny to mostly sunny.  However, we woke up early to solidify our spot on the river to find clouds and fog, which essentially ruins spotting conditions on the Oreti.  We sat for an hour or so, making our instant coffee, scoping out maps and sleeping off the previous late night at the bar in the front seat of the car.  The fog didn't lift and the clouds didn't clear and we eventually said, "Screw it, let's go fishing".

Les and Zach took the upper Patterson Bush Beat and Jeff and I started down the Lincoln Beat only to find shitty spotting conditions and very few fish.  There is so much good water on this stretch of river, however we were only able to see 10 feet of it at a time due to the poor visibility.  We battled for the first 3 or 4 hours, spooking the few fish we saw.  Eventually, I became a bit impatient and frustrated and told Jeff we either need to start blind fishing or sit down and wait for the sun to break so we can actually start spotting fish from a reasonable distance.  Up until then, we hadn't casted to a fish and the ones we did cast to, were one wrong presentation away from buggering downstream.

We stopped to have some lunch which consisted of 3 slices of aged cheese, hand shredded slow roasted chicken breast, incorporated into a dijon aioli, topped with a delicately laid layer of dijon mustard for presentation, of course, wrapped in a whole grain tortilla shell.  But, really what it consisted of was a tortilla with sharp cheddar cheese, or in Kiwi terms, "Tasty Cheese", canned dijon flavored mayonnaise chicken  plopped down onto an aggressive pile of whole grain mustard, mushed together and eaten as fast as it was made.  A pretty tasty meal, but lacking in the gourmet department.  This was eaten just after our amuse-bouche of tasty cheese and summer sausage eaten together in whole.  A great way to get the head right and regain the energy to battle poor conditions.

When we finished lunch, our luck turned and sun peeked through the clouds.  The grey slowly turned to blue and we all of a sudden had ideal fishing conditions with great spotting and low winds for accurate casts.  The fish started to come out of the wood work and we began to have opportunities at feeding fish.  This isn't to say that the fishing was easy.  If there was a doctorate degree given to fish with an emphasis of determining what was real and what was our fly, these fish would have walked with honors and proudly hung their plaque on the wall.  Aside from our experiences with trout feeding on willow grubs down south, these fish were by far the most technical to date.  I felt as though I was pulling all of the tricks out of the book.  I almost went midgy on their asses.  I would change up flies 7 or 8 times only to have them give me the middle fin and spook, leaving me speechless and heart broken.  But, we received more chances.

Jeff hooked into the first fish.  Of all of the flies for this fish to eat, he took no time in demolishing a peacock humpy.  He had this fish on for a minute or so, but ended with it throwing the hook leaving his line limp and his morale broken.  This did, however, give us hope that these fish would eat if we presented the right fly.  It's amazing what that glimmer of confidence will do to an angler.

 I have to give Jeff a ridiculous amount of credit for his ability to spot fish on this river.  Once the conditions improved, he spotted about 90% of the fish before they spooked.  I wish our fishing was as on point.  We kept walking and casted to a few more fish.  Still nothing.  Finally, we came upon a fish and spotted it late.  It didn't flee, however.  It stayed in its lane and continued feeding.  We slowly backed off and got into position to make a cast.  It was my turn to fish and I threw a few different flies at him and he didn't budge.  Didn't even twitch.  Showed no interest.  I attempted a "Bionic Bug", which is a local pattern, tied by a guy named Stu Tripney who owns Stu's Fly Shop in Athol.  The fly is a gigantic fly that doesn't really look like anything and has doll boggly eyes glued onto two foam posts.  This fly usually is a last resort and will sometimes induce a reaction strike with trout.  You plop it down near the fish and with all the commotion on the surface, it will sometimes cause the fish to react without thinking and it will engulf it.  Well, even though it worked in the past, this fish didn't have any interest.  At this point, we walked back up to the fish, even with its eyes and looked at it, just to make sure it was a fish we were fishing to.  Sometimes you are casting for a half hour to a rock without knowing it.  Once we saw it feed again, we backed off and reformulated our plan of attack.

This entire time I thought this fish was spooked, but when we saw the fish eat right in front of us, when any other normal fish would have been a 1/2 mile downstream by now, we knew we had a definite chance at hooking this fish.  I tied on a size 16 Shroeder's Caddis with a traditional, hare's ear soft hackle off the back, trailing about 2 1/2 feet.  On the first cast, the fish swung out and hammered the soft hackle.  I set the hook and my rod was bent.  From there the fight was on.

When I first started casting to him, I thought he wasn't that big.  Maybe 3 to 3 1/2 pounds.  Big back home, but average to below average in New Zealand.  I'm not gonna lie, we're starting to become a little spoiled.  He was a strong fish, however.  I was laying the hammer to him pretty good, but he wasn't budging very easily.  I eventually got him near shore to discover that this fish was enormous.  I beached him in some shallow water and Jeff jumped in behind him and tailed him.  We put him at all of 7 pounds and up until this point, marks the brown trout of my career.  It was an absolutely perfect fish and a perfect way to end a tough day.  It is a time like this that makes all of the patience and dedication worth it.  I could have quit and walked back to the car at that moment.

I'll remember this day forever.  I hope for the opportunity to one day top this fish by the time I leave New Zealand.  But, if not, 7 pounds is pretty damn good.

Zach also roped one in on the Oreti.  Right at 6 lbs.  Good on ya, mate!

Asian Carp

I stole this from my buddy Jesse Robbins blog Solid Hookups.  Pretty damn funny.

Click here to see the video.  You won't regret it.

Three Men and a Tramp

They say that the only danger in New Zealand is yourself.  There are no natural predators, unless you are referring to possums or pack rats that prey on your food.  In Montana, there is always a lingering fear of grizzly bears, black bears, mountain lions and even rustling up a moose that sticks in the back of your mind while enjoying the great outdoors.  Every move, from making noise while hiking, storing your food in a tree 100 feet down wind from where you sleep, pissing on a rock so the salts in your urine doesn't sit in the soil and make a salt lick for a bear, where you spit your tooth paste, or wearing bear pepper spray or a side arm and more importantly how to react to an encounter is a necessity unless you want to end up in the latest mauling news.  In New Zealand, none of this applies.  There is nothing here that can harm you unless you decide to make every bad decision possible in the name of fishing.

We began our journey in high hopes of epic brown trout fishing on a tributary of Lake Monowai called the Electric River.  We heard from a guy back home as well as a couple locals that this river was on their "to fish" list and it was also circled in our atlas from a buddy of ours that had visited this area two years ago for a 5 month hiatus.  On paper, this place seemed like a gold mine and worth the extreme effort to get there.

We drove to the trailhead that began our hike or in Kiwi terms "tramp" and did our final check of our packs to ensure we had enough food and gear for what we planned to be about 5 nights in the bush.  Each of our packs, with our gear for camping and fishing weighed about 50-65 pounds, mine for some reason pushing that 65 lb. mark.  But, I've carried a pack that heavy before and what could possibly be different this time around?

The first lag was about a 4 1/2 hour tramp to a hut a little over half way to the final Lake Monowai hut where the trail ends.  Having not done any serious hiking as of yet, we were pretty beat after this first wave of hike, especially since we lost the trail at the end and ended up finishing the last kilometer in mucky terrain with briars the entire way.  There was one point where my feet got entangled in some of the weeds, about 100 yards shy of the hut and took me down, immediately jump starting a wave of cramps up my calves and my hamstrings.  While on the ground, I couldn't move my legs or my feet, so I couldn't relieve any of the cramps for what felt like minutes but was probably more like 30 seconds.  There were plenty of four letter words yelled at this point.  But, I recovered, finished the hike and we decided to stay the night at the Clark Hut.

We made dinner, had a fire and tried to recuperate our legs for what was going to be a much longer day the next morning.  Sleep came and we were on the trail again by 10 the next morning, feeling motivated for great fishing.  The next lag to the Lake Monowai hut was only 2 1/2 hours and we got there by about 12:30 pm, stopped to grab some lunch and stretch out a bit before the final approach to the Electric River.  We knew that the trail ended at that point and that bush whacking was in our future, but we had no idea what was ahead of us.  We threw the packs back on and entered what is essentially as thick of a jungle as you will find.  No trail.  No flat terrain.  Though we didn't want to admit it, we were entering hell on earth.

On my GPS, it said we were a shade under 4 km from the Electric River as a crow flies.  If you look at that as your local 5 km run at your "Santa Scamper" it would take you roughly 20-30 minutes to run.  It took the three of us 8 1/2 hours to travel roughly 5 km.  It was by far the sketchiest thing I have done to date and I can guarantee you that it won't happen again.  About two hours into the hike, I asked Zach if we had signed the Visitors Log at the last hut and he said, "Oh shit, no.  Did Les?".  We called up to Les with the same question and he replied "No, why?", knowing clearly why we asked.  If something would have happened to us, we essentially didn't exist.  If one of us had broken a leg, turned an ankle, or injured ourselves in a way that made it impossible to return, there was nobody coming to find us.  At that point, it got real.

The terrain we were hiking over with, let me remind you, 60 lb packs on would not be easy even without gear on your back.  After 4 hours of hiking we had only covered just under 2 km and were averaging about .5 km/hr.  The land from the lake shot up 3,000 ft in less than a mile so we were always walking on about a 60 degree side incline.  As soon as you thought you were making progress, you would run into a bluff that you had to back track and climb 100 feet up or down to pass over.  We would be climbing up and grab a root that happened to be rotten and it would tear away leaving you dangling by the one strong hold you had or tumbling down the mountain side.  We all took tumbles, but the scariest occurred when Les was descending down a bluff and attempted to swing down to a good foot hold.  When he began swinging, the momentum from his pack propelled him off the tree he was holding on to sending him into a creek that flowed off a 12 foot bluff onto a rocky shore.  At the last second, as he was about to shoot off the edge, he split his legs and caught himself between two rocks.  There were plenty of close calls, but no serious casualties, other than bumps, bruises and about as low of a morale as is mentally possible.

When we finally got there, my legs were about as exhausted as I have ever experienced and when we reached the beach where we were going to camp, I had career ending cramps in both of my hamstrings, causing me to essentially crawl the last 100 yards.  Setting up camp was not as fluid as it has been in the past.  We were all like zombies, physically and mentally exerted to our breaking points.

We woke up the next morning to the sounds of a helicopter and immediately we thought that some assholes had come to fish the water we had fought for.  On any other day, we would have sprinted out of our tents to wave them off, but our bodies were too sore to move and there were clouds of sandflies around our tents.  If you have never experienced sandflies, or as the Maori call them Te Namu, they are, in large numbers the most evil creature on earth.  The have the stinging effect of a mosquito, but the swarming effect of killer bees.  When I first stepped out of my tent, I was wearing a t-shirt and my arms were more black than skin colored, and every fly that was on me was biting me simultaneously.  Every morning, it is like gearing up for war and if there is any exposed skin on your body, Te Namu will find it.

 

We soon find out that the Electric River doesn't have a single brown in it.  But, instead, on the stretch we fished, which was maybe a mile long that is eventually stonewalled by a waterfall and can't be reached by foot, there were about 10 rainbows all averaging about 15 inches long.  Zach did however rope into a nice 3 1/2 pound rainbow, but overall, shit for fishing.  We came all that way, battled through jungle and had 4 full days of hiking for a half day of mediocre fishing.  Pretty heartbreaking.

We ended up hiking out the next morning through the same bluffed out forest we came in through and pushed through to the Clark hut, signing every visitor book along the way.  When we made it to the car, all of us almost had tears in our eyes, overjoyed by the fact that we made it out alright and that we could finally take the packs off after essentially spending the last 5 days with them strapped to our backs.

We learned an incredible lesson and will sure as shit not try anything like that again.  Our blisters and sores will heal, but that journey will forever stay with us.  It made all of us stronger mentally, but also made us realize that sometimes it's just not worth the risk.  I thank God that we all made it back alive and I look forward to a really nice hot bacon and egg meat pie tomorrow morning in Te Anau.

 Pictures don't do the carnage justice

You live and you learn, but you only learn if you live through it.  Not a bad motto to keep in the back of your mind.

 

NZ Fish Porn

Here's a little string of photos for your viewing pleasure.  There will be more to come.

Queenstown

First off, I apologize for the lack of posts.  Hopefully, I can get all of them in tonight, but otherwise, I will fill them in as I go.  Most of them are outdated, but stories nonetheless.

Onto Queenstown...

It's difficult to put down into words exactly what went down in Queenstown.  As Les so eloquently put it, "It took a month out of my wallet and a year off of my life."  We rolled into Queensotwn on a Monday and were immediately overwhelmed and stressed by the amount of people and cars swarming the streets.  You have to understand that the previous three weeks have not exactly been epitomized by "urban dwelling" or any human interaction for that matter.  We have stayed at a couple campsites or hostels along the way, but each were just a glorified, flatter piece of grass to pitch a tent than the rocky river beds we had previously called home.  Driving into Queenstown was every bit of a culture shock as it was for me visiting Minneapolis for the first time after living in Montana for a year or so.  Busy.

Queenstown initially didn't impress me.  I could confidently attribute that to the ridiculous stress level we had reached when having to deal with "one ways", pedestrian cross walks, round abouts and street lights.  You also have to remember that we are driving on the right side of the car and on the left side of the road, so everything is completely ass backwards.  We finally did find the hostel.  It was called the "Backpackers Lakeside".  The girls met us there and we planned for kind of a last hoorah for the five of us before we begin most of our back country trips and they continue on to do whatever it is they are going to do.  The hostel actually had rooms for $25 per person and the rooms had beds.  I hadn't slept in a bed for all of at least 3 weeks.  I'm not gonna lie, it felt pretty damn outstanding.  The hostel was right on the lake and about a 3 minute walk from downtown.  It was a pretty perfect location.  Queenstown slowly was winning back some points.

Because this town is so touristy and there really aren't too many good fishing options close to Queenstown, we decided to dedicate the next two days to living it up in the city.  This is where I cue my mother to stop reading.  Ha!

Instead of doing a play by play and reminiscing all of the seemingly poor decisions we made in the process, let me just try to describe the nights events in a few phrases.  Drinks were had, ear drums suffered, sleep was lost, fun was had and I pissed off a pier into the lake.

A few notable spots were riding the bull at the cowboy bar, which is about the most stereotypical American cowboy bar in New Zealand.  More American than most American bars in America.  We ate at Fergburger, which is open late night and is extra sloppy when consumed late at night.  Not sure exactly why.  Jesse Lance Robbins can rest assured that his record of two Big Al Fergburgers in one day is safe.  Nobody even attempted it out of pure fear of such a task.

We made friends with a Brit named Louis who ended our second night by taking us to a bar called the "Boiling Room" where they stay open until 4 am, and yes mother, we closed it down.  All of the other places were less memorable, however they all contributed to our less than desirable states come Wednesday.

Since Queenstown is the capital of extreme activities, we spent our final day jet boating in Shotover Canyon, just outside of town.  I was a little skeptical of the entire thing because it was damn expensive and it didn't seem like anything mind blowing.  However, I was soon proven wrong.  These jet boats hold about 12 people and they are essentially a giant wave runner.  They load you in wearing a poncho and a life jacket and take you full speed down this canyon that at times will maybe fit 1 1/2 of these boats wide.  The captain of this boat came within inches from hitting these sheer rock walls and then followed that by twirling his finger in the air to tell us to hold on for the 360 degree flip he's about to do.  I would recommend it to anyone traveling here to give that a go.  I didn't get to bungee jump, but on our way back through, I'm hoping to knock that one off the bucket list.

Overall, Queenstown was a blast.  It definitely dug a hole in the wallet a bit, but I don't regret any of it.  I can always catch up on sleep later.  I can't always party like an asshole in Queenstown.  You only live once, right?

I have to say, though, it did feel pretty nice getting back into the countryside and fall asleep under the stars on my sleeping pad as opposed to a mattress.  What made it better was ending our first day back on the water with the rod bent with a beautiful 4.5lb brown.  It kept our group's "no skunk" streak alive just a shade before dark.  Let's hope I didn't jinx it.  Who's got some wood I can knock on?

Lack of Internet

I apologize for the lack of posts.  I have had very limited amounts of internet capability and at the moment, I am limited to only using 10 MB of space so if I even glance at a picture or even think of uploading pictures, my computer explodes.  I have multiple posts on the ready, so as soon as I get the capability, they should be ready to go.  So much to talk about but so little Wi Fi.

We are currently heading into the woods for about another week and it won't be until then that I will be able to post.

Until then.