Window Into New Zealand

In 2023, I was fortunate enough to travel to New Zealand on a twice-delayed retirement trip (I retired in 2020, so you can guess the reason for the delay).  My wife and I spent almost a month there on the South Island in January//February '23. We fell in love with the place and returned again last winter.  I obviously wanted to fish some down there, and Joel put me in touch with David Lambroughton, who knows the fishing on both Islands intimately.  David then put me in touch with the guides in the Queenstown area, and that is where I have fished exclusively, so what you will get here is a glimpse into the fishing there. 

 

First, though, a little info on the experience in general.  In our winter, they are on daylight saving time, which makes them 21 hours ahead, so it's only a three-hour time difference.  It takes a day or so to recover from the long overnight flight, but otherwise, there is little to no jet lag.  It's also midsummer there, so you parachute into 80-degree days, long warm evenings, and fresh fruit and produce.  Queenstown is a resort and tourist destination situated on a vast lake, and it is busy, but it has a lovely summer vibe at that time of year.  I have rented cars and driven around the Island, and if you are comfortable or at least can get by on that side of the road, it's much easier than the UK. The roads are generally really nice and about the same width as here.  The South Island is generally quite rural, but not entirely unpopulated. There are small agricultural towns scattered throughout the Island.  FWIW, Christchurch is maybe the size of Portland, but without the big suburbs we have. It's clean and upscale and can be accessed directly by a flight from SF.

 

Through David's connections, I ended up fishing 5 days in 2 different years with Todd Adolph, a young guide in the Queenstown area.  He is a really good fisherman, guide, and outdoorsman in general.  We only did day drive-out trips, although he also offers fly-out heli trips and backcountry overnight trips.  I ended up fishing four quite different rivers, two rainbow streams, and two brownie streams.  What they did have in common was low, clear flows, as can be seen in the pictures.  

 

My standard line is that the trout there are not selective; they are spooky.  Pretty long casts from behind the already sighted fish with long (sometimes very long) leaders are the norm, and most of the fish I caught were on various terrestrials.  The common terrestrials at that time of year are cicadas, blowflies ( yes, literally a "fly" pattern that is effective due to all the cattle and sheep by the streams), and willow grubs - a little tiny yellow worm that is a parasite on the willow trees that line some of the streams.  My rough and ready somewhat sidearm casting style honed on the Deschutes was OK with maybe 12-15 foot leaders with bigger patterns but I started running into the wall trying to control a 19-20 foot leader down to 6x with a #22 willow grub behind a tiny PT nymph and a small New Zealand yarn indicator.  Todd gave me quite a bit of coaching, some of it along the lines of "thats not good enough mate.....", as I lined the 5th fish in a row. ... I highly recommend serious practice with the very long leaders before going down there, it's an interesting experience trying to lay out a 30 ft cast with a 20 ft leader.....I think 60-65  ft is at the outer edge of what I was asked to do, but 40-50 ft to an area the size of an end table was really common.  Any really good cast would get a look and usually a take, but the line needs to be well behind the fish and the flies a few feet in front in the feeding lane.  You only get a chance or two.

 

Here are a couple of pics of the upper Matuara River, a very well-known brown trout stream.  There are a ton of fish in this flat, low, clear meadow stream that flows through a ranching/farming valley that looks like Montana.  This is where the super long leaders were needed, and it was really challenging.  The fish are not huge, although there are some very big ones in there.  Browns, weighing up to 3-4 pounds and measuring up to 22 inches or so, are fairly common.

 

I fished two really different rainbow streams, one in an alpine area and one at the head of a large agricultural valley way out in the very rural part of the island.  Both featured wonderful splashing rises and hot initial runs typical of the rainbows here.  Very enjoyable fishing, and not nearly as hard with shorter leaders and larger flies. In return for the effort it took him to get me out there, Todd specifically asked me not to name these rivers because they have problems with YouTube hot spotting, then a group of (usually out-of-country) guys descending on that spot and pounding it to death for a week.  These streams are small, there are not that many fish, and they can't take a tremendous amount of pressure.  Here are a couple of pictures of these streams.

 

Finally, my last day in 2023 featured a long drive to a backcountry brown trout stream.  There are not that many fish there, and they are spread out over hundreds of yards between fish, but they are all big.  We saw one that I'm pretty sure was double digits that we couldn't raise, but I finally hooked and landed the best trout of my life (steelhead excepted), per the pic.  It was the only fish of the day, but by his somewhat calibrated net/scale, it was just under 8 lbs. It was hooked on a blowfly pattern.  FWIW,  all the fishing on both trips was with my 9' 5 wt Scott rod.  The fish really don't have anywhere to go, and there is very little current, so 5x is usually enough to hold them ( the brownie from the Mataura shown above was on 6x).

 

That's a quick overview of my experiences there. If anyone has questions or wants more info, please let me know.