New Zealand Trout Fishing

November - December 1993

Introduction

My wife and I spent from Nov. 26 to Dec. 12, 1993 in New Zealand fly fishing and sight seeing. To make a long story short, we had a fabulous time: friendly people, fantastic scenery, and great fishing! Definitely the best trip ever and one we can't wait to repeat.

Our trip was organized by Judy Green of Frontiers International in Wexford, PA. From their brochures and other literature, we chose to spend four fishing days in each of two lodges on the south island; Motueka River Lodge near Nelson on the northern part and Cedar Lodge in the southern region north of Queenstown near Makarora. The entire trip (including an unpleasantly hot week in Australia) went off without a hitch so I am now a fan of Frontiers.

Our NZ itinerary took us to Auckland, Nelson, Motueka River Lodge, Christ Church, Dunedin, Te Aneau & Milford Sound, Cedar Lodge, Queenstown and back to Auckland. Most of the distance was by air, except we had a limo between Nelson and the Motueka Lodge, then rented a car in Christchurch and kept it for about a week before dropping it off at the airport in Queenstown. From Te Aneau we took a day long tour bus to Milford Sound. Most people think Christchurch is the nicest city in New Zealand, but we both preferred Dunedin. Both have magnificent public gardens.

Motueka River Lodge

We fished Nov. 28 to Dec. 1 at the Motueka lodge which is a forty minutes drive from Nelson on the northern tip of south island. We rate it as a near perfect lodge, situated on a grassy hill overlooking highway 61 and the neat green farmlands of the Motueka river valley. The lodge is surrounded by small well-kept flower gardens and looks down onto fields of grazing deer and cattle with snow capped mountains in the distance. Mick Mason and his lovely partner and cook Fiona are the hosts and are a well-matched pair, he very solicitous and she always considerate and cheerful. While we were there, an adolescent thrush that Fiona had found and raised "by digging up every worm in the garden", was still coming in an open kitchen window for a muffin or a nap in its basket. This was typical of the relaxed charm of the place.

The lodge itself is a new two-story peach stucco building, very light and airy inside and out. It is tastefully decorated with simple antiques complimented by some up-scale local pottery. The kitchen is a dream in natural wood tones and lots of glass overlooking a small garden area. Despite the gourmet food that Fiona produces and Mick serves, the kitchen is always spotlessly clean, tidy, and inviting. Hot tea or coffee and cookies were always available. After four days we felt as if we were leaving home when we left, and my wife suffered for days from "Fiona withdrawal". I was actually disappointed that we hadn't had a rainy day to read and explore their library of fishing and travel books.

There were two couples and one single (four people fishing) during most of the time we were at the lodge, all very pleasant and interesting people. The lodge will take eight in doubles, but Mick says they don't really like to fill it up. The two wives went off one day by themselves to tramp along the Able Tasmen sea shore track, leaving the two husbands and two guides to helicopter into the Karamea river valley for a fantastic day of fishing...I'll come back to this later. One of the nice features of this lodge is that a partner who isn't dedicated to fishing can find many other things to do within and hour's drive.

The head fishing guide is Grahame Marshall who has co-authored several books on New Zealand fishing, but we drew a younger fellow named Dion whose family farms nearby. He stayed with us all four days, and we had a great time. I couldn't have been more pleased with a guide. He worked really hard under difficult conditions of high wind, cloudy days, and spooky browns. Still he found fish that were all but invisible in the crystal clear water and put up with our often pathetic efforts to cast into the strong downstream wind. In many cases we had to resort to a nymph just to get the leader to straighten ahead of the fish.

There are no rainbows in the Motueka, but the browns are fairly plentiful and even under difficult conditions we found about ten a day, all in the three to five pound class. The wind and our lack of experience with large fish limited us to one or two fish each per day brought to net, but we managed to get most of them to take a fly and held on for at least that first run across the river. Since the fish were generally feeding in only a foot or two of water, we typically used 9 foot leaders and another 4 feet of 5x tippet . A typical fish took over 15 minutes to land.

The "untypical" downstream wind was our constant enemy and only on one section of about 100 feet did the river twist around so that casting a dry fly was feasible. The first day I managed to get two nice browns to rise to a #18 caddis in this section, but both broke my tippet after a considerable battle, one just because my thumb just clipped the spinning reel handle during a furious run.

The slow take of these lazy browns to a dry fly that is only 40 to 50 feet away is very exciting. A perfect presentation and drift with zero drag is required, then maybe three inches of big nose slowly rises out of the water and closes over the fly. The one thing I seemed to have right from the start was the equally slow tightening of the line required to make a successful "strike". Nothing like I'd ever called a strike before, but it felt very natural as long as you could follow the fly's drift. Constant communication seems to be the key to let everyone know when you can see the fly. Otherwise it's nearly impossible to strike properly when you see a big green nose slowly rise out of the water just as someone yells "STRIKE".

Mick owns a stretch of land across the road and down to a productive stretch of river, so if you have the energy at the end of the day it's no problem to go down and catch the evening rise. We did so one day after everyone agreed to an early dinner. I came up empty in the dark with fish rising all around for caddis, but another fisherman had the technique down and landed a couple of nice fish.

The day I helicoptered onto the Karamea near its junction with the Leslie was the best of the entire trip. The trip took about 40 minutes each way and cost $1000NZ; even split two ways it was a nice piece of change. But well worth it. Dion and I were dropped off on a "beach" which is their term for an open place covered with one foot diameter boulders; the other fisherman and Graham went a little further upstream. The wind here was not so bad, but still strong enough to make casting a long leader difficult. And the day was cloudy making fish sighting difficult. But the fish were there and with Dion's direction I made some blind casts into likely pools while he watched from the shore. With this method he was able to locate moving fish on which we could then concentrate.

On this river we used 8.5 pound 4x tippets, but I still only managed to land a couple of fish this day, the largest at 4.5 pounds and 23 inches and the other only two inches shorter. This video frame from one of the sequences that Dion shot shows me releasing the largest one back into the clear water.

I did get other strikes and after lengthy battles I broke off two monsters that took me down to the backing on the first rush across the river, then felt like logs as I tried to work them back without hanging up on the boulders sticking out of the water. I never saw anything but the noses of these two fish as they engulfed my humpies, but those were big enough to get my heart racing even before the reel started to sing.

The dry flies that worked best in these rivers were size 16 and 18 hair caddis with dark bodies. Despite the small size these were fairly easy to see since we generally were fishing on fairly short lines. Yellow and green bodied humpies in size 14 also worked and I took one Karamea brown on a royal humpy. But Dion hated flies with red on them so when he saw what the fish had taken he immediately classified it as a "cock-a-bully" (a dumb little native fish), even though it measured 21 inches. A pheasant tail nymph usually worked when the dry failed to get a rise.

Cedar Lodge

This lodge is located just off the highway about two hours north of Queenstown on the lower half of south island. It's situated on the grassy flood plain of the Makaroa river just off highway 6 at the northern tip of Lake Wanaka. Driving in from the road after miles and miles of magnificent scenery, this lodge appears somewhat disappointing compared to the Motueka lodge, but once inside and looking out toward the river it improves considerably. The lodge sits on a flat grassy lawn with sheep fields (paddocks) all around. The river is only a couple hundred yards away, and there are nice views of mountains in all directions.

The lodge has four double rooms, two on each side of the main dinning/lounge room all connected by a common deck. The rooms are comfortable and pleasant but not very private, and the soundproofing between rooms could be better.

The lodge is owned by Dick Frazer and his wife. He runs the fishing and handles the guests and his wife and daughter do the cooking and cleaning. Dick has a flamboyant personality that takes a bit of getting used to, but he has been doing this for a long while and has a very successful lodge with a lot of repeat business.

The food here tends more toward the meat and potatoes side (more to my liking), and it's more informal in that Dick and the guides eat with the guests. Dick tends to dominate much of the conversation before and during dinner, most of it about things other than fishing. We never felt truly comfortable here, but this was perhaps because most of the guests were repeaters and obviously very happy with this lodge while we found it generally less pleasant than the Motueka Lodge. The lodge is sufficiently remote that there is virtually nothing for a nonfishing partner to do.

In this part of NZ, the main river valleys are formed by glaciers and are generally wide and flat with a meandering river flowing in a small part of a rocky flat. Jennifer took this photo of the Makaroa river as we were helicoptering up to the Wilkin river.

Dick maintains two helicopters (a one passenger, and a four passenger) and he generally flies the smaller while one of the guides flies the other. The flights to the rivers here are generally short, and when the mountains are cloud covered most of the rivers can be reached by flying up the valleys from the various lakes to the south. Some streams require crossing higher mountains (as was the case at the Motueka Lodge) and these flights depend more on the weather. By the way, in 1993 weather information was limited in New Zealand; it made us realize how much we've come to depend on satellites and the weather channel! (They have satellite weather now.) The wind was less of a problem here, but was back to gale force on the day we left.

The lodge was essentially full with seven or eight people fishing while we were there. The logistics of getting everyone to the rivers is decided each morning, and it generally takes about an hour to get everyone into position. Dick Frazer makes all of the decisions about who goes where and it seemed to us that some of the guests fed his ego a little excessively, but it wasn't clear whether that produced better fishing sites.

Together with a guide, my wife and I fished a different river/stream each day (Young, Hunter, Wilkin, and Dingle) and had three different guides with Dick doing the last day's trip up the more remote Dingle. Each river has a different character and different fish sizes and densities. On our days the Wilkin had the largest fish and the smaller Dingle Burn definitely had the most. The fishing in this area is mostly for rainbows but some of the rivers also contain browns. It is much easier to catch a rainbow as they will chase a fly that is poorly presented and even rise to a second one after a missed strike. You tend to get sloppy on rivers with both kinds of fish and spook a lot of browns.

Jennifer took this photo of me casting to a couple of browns that were feeding on a shallow gravel bar far out in the river. It's certainly the nicest fishing photo we've taken, and I often have it on my screen at work as the background. If you click on the photo here you'll get the a standard 500 x 375 pixel version, but a 1024 x 768 version cropped slight differently is also available. And yes I know that my rod is back past the 2 o'clock position. I got one of those browns anyway, so there.

We still only managed to land one or two fish each per day with twice that number hooked but not landed. My wife landed her largest fish, a five pound rainbow, on the Wilkin. I landed five on our day on the Dingle with Dick Frazer, but they were in the 18" range at 2-3 pounds; unremarkable fish by New Zealand standards!

The plentiful rainbows on this fifteen foot wide stream (burn) provided some interesting fun at the end of the day. I had missed a strike over one that went back to its lie but would not rise again to any of a variety of dry flies. I didn't want to use a nymph so Dick agreed that I should tie on my own green locust creation. This is a realistic inch long greenish thing with a cork head and a deer hair body and sports short rubber legs and Har-Pearl wings folded along the back. Looks pretty much like a locust to me, and I'm happy to report that the Dingle rainbows went crazy for it. That first reluctant trout threw caution to the wind (water?) and rose to it repeatedly before I calmed down and managed to connect with a properly executed strike. However, the bad news is that although I hooked two and my wife hooked one on this fly during the next thirty minutes, we were unable to keep them on for more than a few seconds. I think the hard head and the large wings just provided too much drag when the trout ran into fast water. Back to the tying bench for a redesign!.

General Comments on Fishing in New Zealand

One hears and reads a lot about New Zealand fishing, but after being there I think the most accurate information is to be found in the books "Catching Trout" and "Stalking Trout" by Les Hill and Graeme Marshall. I havn't seen these books in the US, but they were in all the bookstores in New Zealand. It can't be emphasized too much that one does relatively little casting there and that the skills are quite special. The fish are far apart: a guide can find one perhaps every 50 to 100 yards on a good river; and the bigger the fish, the less disturbance they will tolorate. Some of the biggest browns will respond only to a fly perfectly placed on the first cast, something I was able to do only once or twice. It's hard to imagine how to practice this style of fishing: maybe walk around the block then pick up a rod and with no more than two false casts try to put the fly onto a foot diameter target thirty feet away in a gusty wind...then take another trip around the block before trying again.

After fishing for eight days I think that if I were fishing on my own I could spot maybe 40% of the rainbows and 20% of the browns found by the guides. The fish are often in remarkably shallow riffled water and very hard to see even after a guide tells you where to look.

The mid-day temperature ranged from the mid-forties to the high seventies. Most of the time it was definitely on the cool side for summer; somewhat like San Francisco without the fog. For most daytime outdoor activities, several layers of cotton and a wind breaker coat or vest of some sort were sufficient. For fishing I generally wore three layers of cotton: a short sleeve, a long sleeve, and a sweat shirt; plus a fishing vest. On parts of several days my wife wore a lined jeans jacket over similar layers, but I only wore my cotton car coat on a few occasions. We carried Gore Tex rain gear, but never had to put it on---a good thing since mine was unacceptably red.

One warm sunny day at Cedar Lodge we waded wet in shorts and polyprop long johns---not exactly a fashion statement but very effective. But the rest of the time we used new Simms GoreTex waders over polyprop long johns and jeans. These breathing waders were great for the long walks between fish. We used four and six weight Loomis rods loaded with five and six weight WFF lines. The preferred tippet size in 4x, but we also used 3x and 5x. Leader plus tippet length is generally kept in the 12 to 15 ft range. New Zealand customs may want to look at your waders and boots to make sure they are clean...its a fragile ecosystem down there!

New Zealand doesn't have much ozone overhead and in some places near the water it also has a tiny black sand fly that bites exposed skin. So strong sun screen is a must and insect repellent is advisable, especially when the wind drops. We had no other insect problems. There are no snakes, poisonous plants, or dangerous animals to worry about.

We took a small 35mm camera and hi-8 video with us on most of the fishing outings. It hampered us a bit with the fishing, but we got a lot of wonderful pictures and video (I got a fifteen minute shot of my wife's five pound rainbow from strike to landing). We didn't have polarizing filters so missed a lot of the underwater action.

In addition to the lodges we stayed at the airport Travelodge in Auckland, Eliza's bed and breakfast in Christchurch, Cargills Motel in Dunedin, and Campbell's Autolodge in Te Anau. The Travelodge was a very comfortable and friendly place with two dining areas and washer/dryers. Eliza's was dark and dreary, Cargills was a nice quiet motel at the Best Western level but breakfast there was terrible, and Campbell's was similar, a pleasantly interesting two room with efficiency kitchen with a fabulous view overlooking the lake.

While in New Zealand we found a very useful map booklet entitled "New Road Atlas of New Zealand" published by Moa Becket Publishers (in association with the Department of Survey & Land Information), PO Box 31-042, Milford, Auckland 9. Among other things it contains seventeen two page maps that show roads, national parks, mountain peaks, and most importantly the lakes, rivers, streams and trails (or tracks as they are called).

On my next trip I'd like to fly into the Karamea or some similar remote river and camp for several days. And there will be a next trip. My wife and I are both in love with New Zealand. But till then I'll just have to watch the videos and cringe at my mistakes over and over again.