National News & Information > Features July 2008

At the end are the rainbows by Hugh Creasy

A series of fronts came in from the Tasman Sea, row upon row of iron-grey clouds, so low they closed the horizon to few hundred metres. A gale whipped the wavetops to a frothy spume that coated gravel beaches and dashed against cliff faces till it was hanging in taupata and manuka, making salty the water that drove inland with the storm’s strength.

It was a full five kilometres inland before the rain lost its salty tang and fell fresh and clear on the western ranges. On the forested hills it filtered through the mosses, ferns and fallen timber, gathering colour and growing more acid as its trickle grew to a flow and gushed into a torrent that gouged the riverbed, loosing boulders and fallen timber on a wild journey to the sea.

With the fronts came an Antarctic chill that on the eastern side of the ranges fell as snow and froze water in the ground. It would be early spring before the rivers took that water to the sea. In the west, though, it was cold intensified by humidity, bone-chilling, penetrating and dangerous.

We stood on a hillside and watched the river pass, the water thick with ground rock and bobbing logs. Boulders which, a few hours before, offered protection from the upriver wind, were now buried in pressure waves that rose to shred themselves in spray as the howling wind funnelled up the valley floor. Bare-branched willows, creaked with the force of the flow, and the timber of one showed white where it cracked under pressure.

We sought shelter, all thoughts of fishing overcome. Inside the hut the wind’s noise was hardly muted, and the iron roof magnified the rattle of raindrops. But the fire was lit with wood gathered and cut when the sun was shining. Remarkable foresight but quite accidental. We had passed a stand of manuka that had been cut and left to rot. Some was stacked in the lee of a large rimu and remained unaffected by winter rain. In the grate it burned hot, sending steam from our drying clothes to join smoke up the chimney.

It had not been our intention to stay more than a night in the hut, but with the river becoming impassable, we were trapped there, and we didn’t know how long it would take for the fronts to pass and the river levels to fall. We had fished the river with some success, but returned all fish to the water, intending the last of our catch to be killed and eaten.

The storm upset our plan. Instead we boiled a billy, made coffee and ate glutinous strings of flavoured noodles that constituted the emergency food supplies we carried in our packs. There wasn’t one packet that had a current use-by date. In fact, most of them were a couple of years out of date. No wonder they had the consistency of jelly and no flavour.

The storm raged through the day and into the night, making conversation difficult, and when darkness came we retired to our sleeping bags and tried to sleep. The sound of snoring soon competed with the wind and the wash of rain on the iron roof became a thrumming lullaby.

I woke at midnight to a shriek that rent the air and set my pulse racing. The others slept on, and I watched them, their mouths comically agape, in the moonlight shining through the hut’s single window. The shriek came from a territorial pukeko prowling the swamp next door. The wind was gone and the sky was clear. Outside the noise of the river dominated everything. It boomed through the valley, with an underlying rumble redolent of powerful forces.

By morning the second front was upon us, the wind returned and again rain beat a tattoo on the iron roof.  I have been stranded in huts with people who show various signs of displacement activity. One used the saw blade on a Swiss Army knife and the hut axe to construct a pretty good set of furniture, including a toilet seat from a stack of boards from the previous hut’s demolition. Another went into the forest and gathered firewood with manic intensity, until a huge stack of logs surrounded the hut. Then he chopped them to size. The work blistered his hands, but he worked on till they bled. It kept boredom at bay.

My preference is to tie flies. To this end I have a fold-out plastic box of materials, with just the basics of vise, scissors, bobbin with brown thread, hackle pliers and a whip finisher. As well there is a grizzly hackle cock cape and a natural red, lead wire, copper wire, pheasant tail, peacock herl and a hare’s mask as well as a selection of hooks in various sizes. With just these few basics I can tie imitations of just about any terrestrial or water-borne insect. To copy a green stonefly on the Karamea River, I used strips of green plastic cut from a plastic wrapper around a loaf of bread. The same wrapper came in handy by having just the right shade of yellow to imitate willow grubs. The stoneflies were tied on #10, 2x longshank hooks and the willow grubs on #18 and #22 hooks. They all caught fish.

But those are summer patterns and in the depths of winter I wanted flies that would fish deep. These are the months of heavy nymphs  and wet flies. Bully imitations and freshwater crayfish tied tail first and fished along the bottom with a jerky retrieve can pull big fish. Some of the old traditional patterns like Mrs Simpson and Craig’s Night-time can be effective.

Days of enforced idleness gave me time to add eyes made from melted braided nylon or wraps of copper wire around a stem. There are few rules in tying flies, but they will be much more effective if they swim well. Good balance is essential if they are to be convincing. 

The third day dawned clear and calm and the sun shone. The river was falling and after an hour or two of daylight it was beginning to clear. By midday we could see what the colossal forces of water could do. Boulders were strewn over what had previously been a pleasant reach, and a massive shingle strand built up against upright clumps of bedrock. Tree branches were scattered everywhere. Upstream, around a bend in the river, the sun shone on a backwater which must have been a raging maelstrom a few hours before, and in the now calm water there were shoals of baby trout, hatched only a few weeks beforehand. These delicate creatures circled their home water a metre or so deep , with access to the main river through a narrow channel.

They were an amazing example of survival against the odds. There must have been a backcurrent or wash that afforded them protection through the worst of the storm, and in a few weeks they would be ready to repopulate the devastated river.  To see the power of nature at its most potent is a sobering experience, but to see the survivors of such an event is uplifting and our spirits were raised as we left the river. In a year or two I would catch those tiny fish on the flies I tied in their youth, and I would hold them before their release and admire their tenacity.

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