The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 15.4
WHO’S THE BOSS? Taking the Front Row on New Zealand’s North Island
Words: James Fuller 2024-06-17 10:06:05
After days of river trekking on New Zealand’s North Island, Kelli Dotson knew that her river booty red deer skull was the good luck charm needed to find mythic rising rainbows and browns. Proof was in the results—a seriously sore right arm capped off with forever grins. Photo: Robert Dotson
“Sorry mate, working that weekend now.”
“My wife’s folks just called; they’re coming to stay.”
“Daughter’s got a surfing tournament, no can do.”
Six years had passed since my New Zealand arrival and I’d been keen to tackle a multiday backcountry trip ever since touching down on Kiwi soil. I’d gotten close a couple times with dates set with friends but, as those dates approached, replies to my messages slowed, a sense of foreboding took hold, and then came the excuses.
New Zealand’s backcountry might not have grizzlies but every year five people who venture into it don’t return, another 4,000 are injured and over 500 rescues are triggered. Underestimating terrain and changeable weather patterns are major causes and, as such, carrying locator beacons and buddying-up wherever possible are recommended practices.
I’m happy to play by the rules but this was becoming faintly ridiculous. In those same six years I’d completed an international move, gotten a job, bought a house, divorced, changed careers, gotten engaged and become a dad, but somehow the less-than-monumental task of organizing a couple of nights camping and fishing had proven frustratingly elusive. I was pondering this, and resolving to make more reliable friends, as I made the long drive south from my home in the Bay of Plenty past the acclaimed fisheries of Rotorua and Taupo, over the world-famous Tongariro River, and onward into the lower North Island.
Say “New Zealand backcountry fishing” and most people will think of the South Island, but I’d been told the North Island backcountry, though less celebrated, was its equal in many ways. Keen to find out, I was on my way to rendezvous with friend and guide Johnny Gummer of Altitude Fly Fishing, who thankfully is more serious about keeping his fishing dates.
A quick vehicle drop-and-swap, another hour’s drive deeper into the back of beyond, followed by a leisurely 45-minute hike, and we were there, dumping our backpacks with satisfying thuds onto the banks of a pristine wilderness river, blissfully out of cell phone range. If I didn’t actually sigh, stretch my arms out and say, “This is the life,” the sentiment was there all the same.
We found a small grassy flat a few yards above the rushing river and set up camp in the protective embrace of a crescent of manuka bushes. In short time the late-afternoon shadows lengthened to twilight and then to the all-enveloping blackness you only get when you’re distant from civilization. We lay there, legs hooked over the bank edge, heads rested on backpacks, shooting the breeze about life and fishing.
A former competition fisherman, Johnny had represented New Zealand on numerous occasions and relayed tales of brutal days on the lakes at the 2019 World Fly Fishing Championship in Tasmania, with plummeting temperatures and howling winds driving sleety rain into the bodies of the best flyfishermen on the planet as they battled to find fish. As we chatted, we gazed up at an undiluted, unpolluted night sky crammed with stars. It was like sitting in the cinema front row too close to the screen. With so much to process you’re forced to absorb it in sections, scanning back and forth, eyes moving slowly across the heavens. Beneath us the water rushed ever onward, whilst a morepork—a small owl—called plaintively in the distance.
Condensation dripped from the tent guides and my breath formed in clouds before me as I awoke the next morning. Summer it might have been but it still got cold out here overnight. A looming date with some big trout had added an unspoken urgency to maneuvers as Johnny did the honors with a hearty bacon-and-egg breakfast, cooked atop a bleached-out tree trunk brought down in a previous flood. We packed camp and headed out, making our way upriver with the sun illuminating the ridgelines. As it rose higher, the hillside shadows retreated and the rich greens of the beech forest canopy and punga palms revealed themselves. The sun warmed the valley and it came alive with the wonderful whirring song of cicadas. Dry fly time.
Condensation dripped from the tent guides and my breath formed in clouds before me as I awoke the next morning.
The summer had been hot and the water was low; large, pale, medicine-ball-sized stones, once part of the riverbed, now formed the bank and we boulder-hopped our way from pool to pool. Johnny is younger, fitter and more accustomed to this terrain and we fell into a happy rhythm—well, happy for me—of him outpacing me between pools and then sussing out the opportunities ahead of my arrival.
I would lift my head from my hopscotching approach to assess the situation. Sometimes Johnny would simply be waiting, no fish, but at others he would be frozen like a German pointer, gaze held mid-river, before slowly sinking to his haunches. He would put his hand palm-down, as I neared, indicating “fish at home.” We had done battle with a couple of smaller rainbows in the 3-pound range, one lost, one caught, when this happy scenario played out beneath a steepling cliff face that had witnessed a recent landslide. A now-deceased tree was halfway down that slide, about 50 feet above us, and the torrent of scree and debris that had accompanied its descent had changed the character of the river below. Water finds a way, of course, and it had simply diverted around this fresh deposit and reformed a channel. Just below, a small stream entered.
“Brown,” Johnny said, pointing to a smudgy shape holding a little way down from where the stream came in. With the water low, many of the fish were stationing themselves in faster, more oxygenated water, which made spotting trickier. Having just about made out the fish after asking for the third time, I listened as Johnny outlined the plan of attack.
Anticipation building, I made my way 50 yards downstream in the crouched, scuffling fashion of a soldier moving house-to-house avoiding fire, before hooking a 90-degree turn and entering the river as stealthily as I could with excitable feet. With my angles altered I called for direction as I made my way back upstream.
“He still there?”
“Yep. You see that big dry rock entering the water just up to your right?”
“Yes.”
“You see the two currents coming together upstream of that?”
“Yes.”
“Aim for that V, he’s just downstream of that.”
With the clarity of the water, leaders 18- to 20-feet long and accurate casting are imperative. Your first cast is the most important as you might not get a second. I’m not going to lie and say I nailed every cast—I didn’t—but this one landed with appreciable grace in a mirror-like bit of water between the two currents and my blue humpy began drifting lazily back toward me. As it did so a muscular silhouette rose with unhurried confidence through the water column in time to the rising exhilaration in me, and then a big triangular snout appeared where my dry fly had been moments before. A pause, and I lifted.
In the countless flyfishing videos we all watch they simulate this moment well, slowing down the footage, removing the sound, as the fish takes and the angler raises their rod. This is the moment. This is the moment you’ve driven half a day for, the moment you’ve been daydreaming about while work colleagues thought they were talking to you, the moment that has compelled you to spend more money on gear than you’d ever admit to your wife, husband or yourself. You’re now directly connected to six pounds of very angry trout in full flight mode. All hell breaks loose. Big fish in small, gin-clear water present many challenges; you overcome one simply to reach another. Any momentary satisfaction at hooking up better quickly be replaced by a renewed focus or you’ll be left with slack line, a straightened rod and some choice words drifting away on the mountain air.
The big brown barrelled its way through the length of the pool and up into the shallow water at its head. I jumped out onto the bankside boulders and followed as quickly as I could with arched rod held high. The fish was now trying to thump through a stretch that was more rock than water. Spray plumed into the air as its paddle tail thrust powerfully, body half-in and half-out of the water like a salmon running up to spawn, its olive back, golden flanks and fat black spots glinting in the sun.
It’s a privilege to catch these fish, take some quick snaps for posterity, slip them back and watch them melt away with a few languid tail strokes.
“If you’re not the boss of them, they’re the boss of you,” Johnny had said earlier about the close-quarter combat that defines many of these fights. I was fairly sure where the balance of power would lay if it got out of these rocks and up into a snaggy stretch above. But mercifully it turned and headed back into the pool where it was easier to handle and a few minutes later it lay panting in the net beneath us.
At this moment, all the effort expended, the challenge of the stalk, the intensity of the fight and the sheer size and beauty of the fish all build, embodied in a yell of joy that comes from the pit of your guts up through your chest and gets airborne with all the gusto you can give it.
These backcountry waters are delicate systems and rarely did we see more than one fish in a pool and frequently there were none. It can be a long walk between fish but doesn’t feel that way. It’s hard not to be high on life when you’re out here, part of it all, listening to the piping whistle of an unseen whio (blue duck), smelling the musky scent of a deer that has bolted up a side creek on your approach, watching huge sinuous eels emerge from the depths before snaking away again, interacting with inquisitive, flighty little fantails, or feeling the crisp coolness of the mountain water permeating your tramping trousers as you wade the river.
Every fish out here, big or small, hooked or not, landed or not, is an event. Another of these not-to-be-forgotten experiences was a big brown that, early in the contest, had bolted for a small dark cave on the far bank and was pigheadedly refusing to come out. Johnny waded across to attempt to net it in situ but as he got close, agonizingly close, the fish powered out past his outstretched hand and thundered downstream. Johnny swung round, temporarily blindsided.
“Which way did he go?’”
The bow wave now tracing a line down the shallower water of the far bank directly behind Johnny’s legs told its own story. The power of these fish is extraordinary, and with the strength of the current now added to its own it tore away downstream. As it did so, in my peripheral vision I was conscious of a form sprinting across the riverbank rocks in determined pursuit, long legs swallowing up the yardage, feet playing “hot potato” with each boulder top, net swinging at the end of a flailing arm. The fish had taken refuge in a rocky rapid 40 or 50 yards from where the battle had begun but Johnny pounced before it had a chance to set off again and held the great fish aloft in triumph, letting out a holler that echoed in the valley. I responded in kind.
It’s a privilege to catch these fish, take some quick snaps for posterity, slip them back and watch them melt away with a few languid tail strokes. Two nights and three days moving upstream and camping out under our own steam had brought some rich rewards and even richer memories. You earn these fish and that all adds to the satisfaction.
When you’re “big and bent and gray and old,” as Johnny Cash sang, you relive these days with joyful clarity—long after you’ve forgotten the name of that guy you used to be friends with, you know, the fella who kept bailing on fishing trips last-minute.
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