Fly Fish New Zealand Road Trip With Mark & Tom

Tom and Mark arrived in New Zealand after have spent the past 2 months filming in Antarctica for an upcoming wildlife doco. They had a stop over here in NZ on the way home to the UK and decided to stay for a 2 week fly fishing road trip around the lower the South Island. We arranged to meet in location "X" and spend a couple of days exploring some local streams and also to get the guys up to speed with our style of fishing here in New Zealand so as they could fish on there own for the rest of their stay. The first day saw us walk into a small stream that holds good numbers of both Brown and Rainbow trout in the 3-4lb range. We spotted plenty of fish in the faster water and deeper holes and the boys managed a couple of fish each by mid morning .

By midday the wind started to pick up and made things a little tougher for the boys , but the stream I had chosen was quite sheltered from the strong Norwester that had been forecast for the day so we battled on with both of them managing another couple of fish each by the time we arrived back to my truck, all and all a great introductory day for them to New Zealand fly fishing !

Day 2 we headed into a head water stream that had just received a big fresh through it but had dropped back down to it's regular flow over the past couple of days. Both Tom and Mark each dropped big browns in the first deep pool of the day ,one barreled under a snag and broke off and the other unfortunately spat the hook ...a shame as both were very sizeable fish ! They licked their wounds and we continued on upstream where found fish stacked up along the edges in the deeper runs , the rig I set them up with was the typical "dry-dropper" rig used here in NZ. A buoyant #10 or #12 dry fly like a Royal Wulff or Para Adams with a small Tungsten beaded nymph around #14 or #16 suspended 20-40cm below it. Several times fish rose and ate the dry but most inhaled the nymph without hesitation only to then take off downstream and through the bouldery rapids trying to break themselves off, on a couple of occasions we ended up netting the fish 200m downstream of where the fish had been hooked. We netted around 15 fish for the day allRainbows and all were in very good condition. On one run the boys were on opposite sides of the river and carefully working up the edges when both hooked fish almost simultaneously with one fish tearing off upstream and the other down stream , I followed Tom as he didn't have a net , leaving Mark to land his own fish , I arrived just as he had the fish under control and in the net with a grin from ear too ear ! All up a great couple of days with a couple of top blokes.