National News & Information > Features December 2007

At the end are the rainbows by Hugh Creasy

The painted stucco front of the Ikamatua pub was spotted with hatched mayflies – Deleatidium by the look of them. The pub was a fair way from the Grey River, but there were numerous small streams and ditches that could have had a hatch over night. It bode well for a drive upriver. 

There is a problem when fishing under pressure. The lack of time does not allow for a leisurely study of a river’s rhythms – its peculiarities and productivity. We were due on the ferry back to Wellington in 6 hours, so the inspection of the river had to be quick and efficient. It’s a type of fishing I have grown to dislike.

There are many anglers who race up rivers, cast vigorously to visible fish, either put them down or catch them and race to the next pool to repeat the experience in some sort of frenetic  dance along the riverbank. They live for the adrenalin kick as each fish takes, but each experience begins to lose its individuality in the rush to get to the next one. There is no time to savour the occasion. Once caught the fish becomes a nuisance that interrupts the need to catch another.

It’s the same attitude that drives many duckshooters who regard the bag limit as a target to be met or surpassed, rather than enjoying the experience of attracting the bird, a clean shot and the retrieve by a well-trained dog. The completed experience ends with eating the bird – something many hunters have no experience of.

We drove the road alongside the river and turned off the gravel and on to a grassy track that led to the river. The reach was long and strewn with big boulders in clear water, deceptive in depth. Between the boulders the river ran over slabs of pale stone, green-streaked with weed  and slippery with algae. From the cover of silver beech we searched the water for fish. In such clear conditions they should have been easy to see, but it wasn’t until one moved to take a fly that we saw it, obvious and near.

To cast to it meant wet feet, and in the deceptive shallows the angler was waist deep before he reached the best casting point. A dry fly first, Dad’s Favourite, lobbed into the feeding line. The fish was rising as the fly landed and it eyed the fly then descended to the deeps and invisibility on the river bottom.  The fly was cast again, and again the fish rose to other temptations and left Dad’s Favourite bobbing its jaunty way downstream to be cast again and again to a disinterested fish. At least it did no damage, and allowed a change to a nymph, a hairy #12, lightly weighted. It bobbed down the current, rejected after inspection.

And so it went on, fly after fly attracting not a scrap of interest, though we did begin to wonder at a fish that could spot a fake so easily should continue to rise to every one when common sense dictated a rush to cover under the nearest rock.

There comes a time when drastic action must be taken – action that will lead to either glorious success or ignominious defeat. Many years ago I fished the Karamea River for the first time. Day after day  I trudged its poolside tracks, casting dainty flies to huge brown trout without success. A tramper joined us in the hut at the Crow River confluence, and from his bag he pulled his spinning rod and spinners. The spinning rod was actually a boat rod, stiff as a board, and his spinners consisted of steel washers of graduating sizes through which passed a bolt and a nut to press the washers together. Holes were drilled in both ends of the bolt, one to take a split ring and a hook and the other to attach a swivel and line. The spinner must have weighed near half a kilo and the breaking strain of the nylon would have been well into double figures. The tramper happily tossed this metal into pools containing big fish and they took it with great enthusiasm.

That night I took a #10, 4x long-shank hook, gave it a double wrapping of lead wire and a coating of silk before spinning on some bright green seal’s fur and a thorax of peacock hurl. Next morning  I cast this clumsy imitation of the green stonefly in to the nearest reach and a fish took it. For the rest of the week fish continued to take that fly and others I tied for my companions. We cast without finesse and bombed the pools relentlessly, and no matter what disturbance those ugly flies made on the surface, the fish took them.

So, here we were on the Grey in a similar situation. There were two of those flies still in my flybox, so I passed one to the angler and he tied it on. Casting so much weight was a challenge in itself, and trying to get the fly on the end of a 4-metre leader to go where you wanted became a matter of luck for the angler. A clout on the back of the head from the forward cast taught him to keep his back cast high. Eventually he cast the fly in front of the fish and it entered the water with a generous splash. The fish was holding on the bottom and didn’t spot the fly till it was almost at the tail of the pool, then the fish darted back and missed.

Another cast to the head of the pool and this time the fish took the fly, and fought powerfully till it was brought to the net.

My point is that there is a time for delicate presentation of light flies on light tackle to get the best result, but when it doesn’t work, then big flies, wet or dry, can provoke a reaction. What possesses a fish to be selective one day and on the next to take a fat wad of seal’s fur wrapped around a lead-weighted hook is beyond my comprehension. It must have fed well on green stonefly and its brain was locked into the general shape and colour, though I would think that on its release it would be forever wary of such careless attack.

And those mayflies on the wall of the Ikamatua pub were no indication whatsoever of what was going on in the river.

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