Time flies

Well some how it's been nearly 3 weeks since I wrote my last blog. I have been busy guiding and been all over the shop in both 4WD and Heli fishing mode with single day trips and multi day trips. The weather has continued to be spring like but there has been some absolute stunning fishing days. The fishing has been a mix of nymph and dry fly fishing with more of the latter starting to come into play. We have been enjoying the use of the usual suspects - Green humpies, Royal Wullfs and Blow flies and there has been some reasonable brown beetle activity around in the evenings too. Nymphs will continue to play a valuable role through out the season. I have had good success with emergers and soft hackles also over the last 2 weeks.

All the backcounrty fisheries I have evisited have been holdinng good numbers of rainbow trout higher up the system and the brown trout seem to more abundant lower down. The brown trout are all in seeming great condition early season and of the rainbow trout are post spawning with the exception of course as is the always the case when it comes to fishing.

I am seeing a great deal of masting in the beech trees and there might be a good mouse season coming up around the place!

The next week looks a little unsettled again but lets wait and see and take it as it comes.

Get in to Queenstown Sports world and get geared up.

Remember Check Clean and Dry.

Tight Lines

Another week in the Southern region

After the last storm that brought snow to low levels throughout Southland and into Otago and even Canterbury as expected the rivers flows remained low due to the cold keeping the snow from melting. We had one of those rare blue bird days with a light southerly yesterday - the southern fly fishers wet dream! Being a Sunday many folks were out to enjoy some fishing before or after voting and I am sure many had great fishing. We certainly did with most fishing taking nymphs but the odd fish free rising from time to time and a quick switch to a black gnat proving a wise change.

We did see something a little off putting yesterday. On a river that has a series of beats and anglers access signs right beside a main road but not a single vehicle at any of them we decide to stop and use one of the beats for our mornings fishing. We rigged and walked over to the river and dropped about 100m below the vehicle to start walking up and very shortly encountered a vehicle on the far bank that doesn't have public road access and is all farm land. I walked up to the one figure I could see and he informed me that he had driven down that side and dropped 4 fisherman off (so there was 5 fisherman in total) spread out over the next 4 fishing beats upstream. I said ok mate we are out of here and headed off to another area and had a successful day. Now I have no problem with other parties of fishermen, its parr for the course in rivers with roads beside them, however trying to be a sneaky and driving down the other side of the river thru farm land dropping of so many other fisherman when there are public anglers access signs from the other side is not really fair in my book. We were lucky that we realized what the situation was very early in our day and got out of dodge city but it could easily have been different and our day would have been wrecked. These jokers could have used two road public accesses and put 2 parties of two fisherman together, left the vehicle at one of the accesses and a sign at the other rather than spreading them out over 4 beats with no indication of them even being there from the public accesses. I am pretty sure that most other anglers would have been very annoyed to see this kind of conduct going on and it should not be condoned in any way.

If there are public accesses, use them. Leave a sign in your vehicle saying which way you went, UPSTREAM or DOWNSTREAM and if you want to be really nice write the time down you started off on the sign as well.

November Rivers Open and the Spring weather continues

The weather was quite rough for Lower South Island back country opening day with high winds being followed by a nasty but quick moving front. Anybody who walked into the backcountry rivers would have had a great time if the had the opportunity to fish the next 2 days which were about as perfect blue bird as you can get.

It just goes to show how far South we are situated here (45 deg S) this morning it is snowing hard out (still is as I write this) and has even been settling in some places Queenstown. A very cold blast has come charging up from the Antartic. I am sure it will pass quickly enough and 2moro will probably be bluebird at least out west, maybe not down south.

The rivers wont be too affected as the storm has come in exceedingly cold. There could be some rises in river levels over the next couple of days when it warms up due to snow melt but the mostly there will be clean water available to fish and the higher up the system you go the better it should be.

I have been out guiding a bit since my last report and there has been some excellent fishing if you can beat the roaring 40's winds - local knowledge is a good thing - you can't beat the wind but you can work with it.

Some of the small spawning streams that have just opened seem to have had early spawning runs and numbers are down as rainbow trout have already been dropping back (it's always possible that its the other way round tho) into the main system or lakes. However the bigger of the backcounrty rivers are fishing well and will contiue to do so over the next few months and some of the small streams are still well worth a walk.

Nymphing has been the way forward for the upstream fisherman but dry fly is starting up as the temps increase and it won't be long now until we see some beetle action.

Didymo - it's still there so don't be complacent, check clean dry. Most of the rivers that have been more affected by it over last summer down here seem to have had some good floods strip much of it out and there was been some great fishing in areas that were choked up with it last summer.

Some of the rivers that have bad didymo build ups when I have been there over the last season or 2, the fish we have caught have been in excellent nick and have been very accepting of taking a dry. I have a theory - the fish are looking towards the surface more often for food sources to eat and therefore will come to the dry more easily than when they were feeding pre-dominatly on nymphs prior to didymo. I will continue to explore this strangely exciting idea.