One of my favourite fishing places is in the Upper Waitaki Valley, this offers a great variety of fishing and in general you can usually find somewhere where there is good fishing to be had.
It was one of those rare occasions when I had been really struggling to get on to any fish at all, in fact I had spent two days working my tail off without one single fish to show for it.
The weather had been good but now had turned rather nasty with a strong cold wind. For a change I left the fly gear at home ant took my spin fishing gear out and decided to fish in one of the hydro canals some distance downstream from one of the salmon farms.
What I did was to look for the beaten track and start where that ended and fish downstream. A couple of hours of nothing followed and by now it was getting dark, the wind was howling up the canal and it was getting rather unpleasant, in fact I had decided to fish may way back upstream to the car (about 100 metres) and go home.
I sheltered between a couple of scrubby bushes sitting on the bank, elbows resting on my knees and kind of half heartedly winding in the lure when all of a sudden it felt like someone had tied a bus onto my line. I was on my feet in an instant, as you do, and could only watch as the line was rapidly stripped off my reel.
It was about now I remembered I had replaced my line that day with Berkely fireline and I hadn’t used a backing so I only had a little over 100 metres of line and it looked like about half of that was out now, I tried to slow the fish a little but the line was only six pound and with the rod tip bent roughly level with the reel I didn’t want put too much pressure on it.
I started to slow him up a bit, I hadn’t seen the fish at all but I could feel that it was heavy. Gain a bit of line, lose it again this went on for another 40 minutes but I was slowly gaining on the fish, it was getting quite dark now and I still hadn’t seen the fish.
After 45 minutes the fish gave up and I was able to get him in the last 20 metres, Finally I got a look at the thing… Bloody hell now all I had to do was net the sucker, I managed to get it mostly into my net and grabbed the sides and lifted, I didn’t think the handle would be strong enough to lift the fish.
Typical huh… Cold, miserable and not very pleasant at all and then you get the fish of a lifetime, 14lbs 5ozs of rainbow trout.
The only thing left is to get it mounted then and show it off for the rest of my days right?
Well not quite, it was filleted and smoked and was absolutely beautiful, the nicest trout I have ever eaten.
This picture shows the fillets sitting on breakfast trays ready to be smoked. They were some of the nicest coloured fillets I have seen.
I decided to eat this one because I know there is bigger fish there yet so I’m still trying for that trophy fish.
Hopefully the next one will be on the fly 
Great story. It takes quite a confident angler to eat a 14 pound trophy rainbow. Best of luck to you in your efforts for a bigger one!
Ol’ Eagle Eyes