Club Fishing Competition…

I decided to have a go at catching a decent fish to enter my fishing club competition, there are some pretty experienced fishermen in our club and it is quite a challenge to get the better of some of these guys. Again I chose the Shag River which is less than 5 minutes drive from my house. I went out early in the afternoon, it was a bit breezy and the sky was a partly cloudy causing changing light conditions which made spotting fish a bit troublesome.

Brown Trout 6lbs

I walked the 50 metres from where I parked to the first decent hole, I noticed a good looking fish sitting right in the middle at the shallow head of the pool. I hadn’t even finished setting my gear up so I squatted down in the grass and got ready.

It seemed every time I cast the wind gusted and blew my cast off course, I snagged and lost flies, broke the tippet and had to tie on some more nylon, the fish came and went and came back again… Finally he fell for a hare and copper nymph.

This pool has its fair share of snags and trees and the first thing this fish did was to tear off downstream and into a small willow growing right in the water which usually results in the fish breaking off but this time I managed to get it back out and a short while later had a very nice 6lb fish on the bank.  I carried on fishing for a while and in a very long shallow run spotted another good looking fish.

I tried a couple of casts but with the wind and the distance I wasn’t able to land a fly anywhere near the fish, I broke the tippet off so I tied another one on, the fish was feeding off the bottom and very slowly moving upstream. To get closer I let him move up a bit then on hands and knees crawled down the bank and got behind a small willow that was in the edge of the water.

Brown Trout 6lbs

Again I broke the tippet off and lost the fly, I tied a nymph directly on to the leader, I got casting and made a total pigs dinner, the line landed heavily in an untidy mess beside the fish…. The splash seemed to get the fish’s attention because he turned and took the fly.

As soon as I got the rod tip up he took off downstream and left me on one side of the willow with him on the other, I had to let the line go slack so I could flick it over the branches which usually lets the fish get off but again my luck was in I cleared the line and still had the fish on.

The day ended up being very enjoyable and I had a couple of great looking fish of good size to enter in the contest…. As it turned out I did win with my two fish being by far and away the biggest entered.  I do have to confess a bit of pride when the guys had to get heavier weights out of the box to weigh my fish and both fish were longer than the official club measuring device which can only measure up to 24 inches and my fish were 25 and 25 1/2 inches.

These are probably the last large fish I will keep for a while, I have decided to squeeze the barbs down on the hooks and just do some catch and release fishing. I have caught some awesome fish but I do very much  believe in respecting the fishery and since these large fish are the good breeding fish I don’t want to take too many.

November catch up….

What can I say… I suck at keeping things up to date and the journal section is no exception. I do have a good excuse for my tardiness and that is it is much better to be fishing than writing about it.

I have been doing a bunch of fishing lately, all at pretty much at the Shag River and I must say I have had some pretty good results.

Brown Trout 5lbs 6ozs

The first fish for my ‘november’ catch up is a nice brown trout that weighed in at a pretty reasonable 5 pounds 6 ounces.

I had seen this fish a couple of times but had been unable to get a cast at him without spooking him, just shows if you keep trying you will sometimes get a break.

2.5lb Sea Run Trout

I decided to check out a stretch of the river that I hadn’t visited since last season and as the water level was dropping I wanted to get a good look before the warm weather really got the weed growth happening.

It turns out this was a very good move, although it wasn’t the easiest to see trout I saw enough to make it very interesting and had quite a lot of chances.

5.5lb Brown Trout

I spent quite a while at one particular hole, I sat on the bank amongst the cutty grass and sheep shit for half an hour while a fish swam backwards and forwards only a couple of metres in front of me.

He must have done his beat 20 times and I’d tried at least 15 flies on the sucker before he gave in and took the fly… I excitedly lifted the rod tip only to have the line break and the fish was gone.  I did a short while later catch a very handsome brown trout that weighed in at a very respectable five and a half pounds.

Just when you think you have seen it all….

It was a very pleasant afternoon, overcast but warm and still.

I decided to take a look at the Shag River so I grabbed my gear and off I went.  It was as I had thought, still and warm with a bit of a mayfly hatch going on.

I saw a few fish, hooked and lost one but it was quite hard going the water is very clear and the level has dropped considerably which tends to make the fish pretty wary.

I started heading back toward the car fishing the likely looking places, again I saw a few fish but in the second last pool I found a good sized brown trout.  I was caught a little out in the open, I had a good cover of gorse behind me but was squatting there with no cover in front while the fish slowly moved upstream, it was feeding on nymphs or other insects low in the water.

I waited while the fish passed by less than 5 metres in front of me, I hardly dared to breathe for fear of spooking it.  It looked like a good fish 4-5lbs easily.  After what seemed like an eternity it had got far enough upstream for me to try a cast, no sooner had my fly landed on the water and the fish turned to look when a duck exploded from the gorse behind me.   I nearly shit myself it gave me such a fright… Worse was to come it hit the water and started the fake injured duck routine which involves splashing across the pool, the fish took off as did the other three in the area.

I stood up and told the duck I thought it was very rude to do that to me (or something like that) all of a  sudden the rod jumped in my hand, I had just managed to think hell there must have been another fish which I didn’t see that has grabbed the fly and hooked itself when the duck started quacking and splashing like crazy.

I discovered that the duck had gone under my flyline and had managed to get hooked in the wing, this is not how things usually go.  Eventually I managed to drag the duck in and with the aid of some small pliers I was able to remove the hook and let the stupid bird go on it’s way, the fake injury is something the mother duck does to lead you away from her young which is why I let it go, later in the season it might have been duck for dinner instead of trout.

Are you #$*!$#% Kidding…

After a great start to the season it has all pretty much turned to shit over the last couple of days.

Firstly as I tried to change spools on my reel the spool wouldn’t go on the spindle, a quick look revealed that the bearing had fallen to pieces so I re-fitted the spool holding the sinking line, the bearing in that now sounds and feels like it has a handful of sand in it (which it didn’t of course) so back to the shop they went.

I only purchased the reel and spare spool in march and for about 5 months since then the season has been closed so it has had very little use.

I was beginning to suffer withdrawal symptoms so I grabbed my old reels and headed off to my favourite spot on the Shag River.  It was warm, calm, a little overcast and the fish were everywhere, In the first pool I got a shot at two quite good looking browns but ended up spooking both of them,

In the second pool there was an absolutely cracking brown so I very carefully got a cast away, nothing doing, it was then that I decided to try a second cast and as I back cast the fly hooked in a bush down the bank a little from where I was standing and it looked like the tip section had come off but no… The bloody rod had broken.

My nice new rod, purchased at the same time as the reels and used only a couple of dozen times is now buggered… Geeez I bet the rest of the season is going to be awesome.

Old Fishing Books update

I have spent a little bit of time updating and improving the layout of the Free Old Fishing Books page.

The result is a much better way of displaying the books as well as a better way of hosting them.  It is really simple to open the file to read it and a very simple click save to get a copy of the file on your own computer.

You will need Acrobat reader or another pdf capable program ro be able to read the books.

Simply go to the old fishing books page to get access.

The Maniototo… My first trip.

For the last couple of seasons I have intended to get inland and fish in the Maniototo area and until yesterday all I had done was think about going.

I was invited to join a friend on a trip to Lake Onslow as he was going to take his boat up and have a look around… I of course accepted the invitation and set off with my eldest daughter and met up with my mate and his son.

The weather forcast was for strong winds and they weren’t wrong but we did get out on the lake for a while, being a high country lake it wasn’t that rough but the dull gloomy light conditions along with the tanin stained water made it hard to spot much so trolling was pretty much the order of the day.

Lake Onslow on a blustery dull day

WooHoooo It’s fishing season again…

For weeks I had been counting down the days until opening day, I had a license, my gear was all checked and I had arranged time of work.

Opening day arrives and I go to work… Yup that’s right I go to work it was a busy time and I thought I’d go in and help out, who knows I might be able to get out in the afternoon… Wrong the day turned to crap it was freezing cold, blowing like hell and pissing down with rain so there was pretty much little point in going out.

The next day (my birthday)  dawned a bit brighter, I got finished work at lunch time and headed off to have a look at my favourite section of the Shag River.

It had become overcast and gloomy and was hardly the best time of day but I figured I could at least look for some fish and check out how the river had handled the winter flood events.

Imagine my surprise when I found a hatch of mayflies going off, it wasn’t a big hatch but rather patchy and sporadic but ity was certainly enough to encourage the odd trout to rise quite freely.

So what looked rather average in the beginning turned out to be a cracker, I hooked the very first fish I cast a fly to but it did a couple of flip flops and chucked the fly, not bad though, first cast at a fish and a take.

Some walking and searching later put me in the right place to try for a good looking brown trout, I used a pheasant tail nymph and the fis never hesitated, a nice clean take and a rather long battle, the fish wasn’t overly large but it did seem to be quite fit and remarkably strong.

First fish for the 2008/09 season ~ 3 1/2 lbs

I kept looking around for a while but by now the wind was getting up and the light was failing as the cloud cover thickened.

I decided to go upstream and have a look at a couple of nice stretches and see if they were still good after the winter, I found a rising fish but was unable to make contact with it so I changed to my sinking line, attached a brown wolley bugger and fished the hole where the fish had been taking off the surface.

The next thing I had a handful of very angry trout and it tore off into the depths of the pool determined to hold there, I usually fish reasonably light tippets so I didn’t want to really lean on it so I just kept a steady pressure on and eventually. like after 10 minutes or so I managed to get him a bit nearer the surface.

It took a while but eventually I landed this fish too, not bad for a marginal day and not a bad way to spend some of your birthday.

Second fish ~ 5lbs

Old Fishing Books Update

I have just moved the old fishing book pdf’s to a new server which should cure any of the recently experienced hosting problems.

I uploaded a few new books and will over the next couple of weeks upload some more.

The books are still free to download…. Simply use the “Old Fishing Books” link at the top of the page and go from there.

Enjoy

I can’t go fishing soooo…..

The Fishing Season Ends.

Geeez its that time already… The 30th of April is the end of the fishing season here which means all but a couple of kilometers of river are closed now until the 1st of October which is like half a lifetime away.

One day and already I am looking forward to opening day

The only place I have locally now is the lower section of the Shag River which is quite tidal and has an area of estuary, I have never really fished much in this part of the river but this year I am thinking that I might spend some time exploring this area.

There are a few locals that do seem to catch the odd fish or two down there, might be an opportunity to try some salt water fly fishing around the river mouth.