Matt and Pudge spent 3 days fly fishing with me few seasons back around the Twizel-Omarama region. The boys re-booked last year but had to pull the pin as Matt was getting married and the budget blew out cutting into his New Zealand fly fishing fund ! This trip they decided to come out early season and fish in the Southland region this time round. We based our selves at the Mossburn Hotel , a classic "Kiwi-Style" pub that serves great food and good beer , something that should never be overlooked when planning a fishing trip ! The small township of Mossburn is situated on the banks of the famous Oreti river , a river well known throughout the world for its wily big Brown Trout and back country scenery.

We got up and away early on the first day only to be greeted by 2 other parties at the car-park , one chap was camping in an SUV and the other was just leaving as he had fished the river the previous day and was moving onto a new region to fish. We spoke to the bloke who was camping and agreed that he would head upstream for the day . We walked downstream and fished a small side stream first up ,high cloud and very little sunshine made things tough going but Pudge managed a nice fish from the first run , a fit fish of exactly 5lb.

We progressed up stream slowly , carefully fishing all the likely water paying special attention to the drop offs and seams. Matt dropped a big fish a couple of pools up , he had too much slack in his line,when the fish ate his nymph and his indicator shot down he had to much line to pick up before he could get a good hook set in the trouts jaw. After some ribbing and banter from Pudge we moved on and came to a big pool with a shallow tail out , there was a good fish swinging in the current , a quick fly change to a dry- dropper set up was made so as to not spook the fish with a bulky indicator and double nymph rig. Manics guide chute has become my number one dry-dropper fly as it will suspend a small or well weighted nymph under neath and is very visible as and indicator in faster water. Matt got into position and cast ahead of the fish by a meter or so , the fish moved across slightly and took his small suspended nymph ...game on ! After a 5 min tug of war we had a beautiful 6.5lb brown trout in the net.

A couple more fish made it to the net over the next few hours and we decided by mid afternoon we had a fair old walk out so broke the rods down and headed back. A top day with a couple of good buggers.