National News & Information > Features October 2007

At the end are the rainbows by Hugh Creasy

There was a time, it seems long ago, that I welcomed the wind’s fierce challenge. To stand, legs braced to its power, and watch the scud of cumulus through a filter of flying leaves and scattering mist  excited the senses.

It was a challenge to cast a fly, to retain balance and keep my glasses free of water spray. But the challenge has become eternal, and I’m sick of it.

Endless fronts march across southern seas, dumping rain and sleet as they cross our coasts, before heading into the Pacific in a great loop, picking up more water and more wind to bring it all crashing down on us from the northwest.

It seems never-ending – the garden is blasted, spring blossoms either dessicated by drying northerlies or turned to slush by freezing wet southerlies that carry with them a humidity in the 80s. The wind-chill factor is horrendous. The rivers rise and fall, often unfishable and never reliable.

The price of fuel makes it expensive to travel to a river only to find it running thick with sediment, even in the upper reaches. It is the curse of El Nino, and it shortens tempers and leads to crimes of violence. 

But there is a place where a river flows through an angled gorge, negotiable by foot if you don’t mind wet boots and a fair climb, surrounded by tall beech forest for most of the river’s run till the last few kilometres to its source high up in the mountains.
The forest floor is thick with Hypnodendron mosses and patches of filmy fern on old logs of long-lived trees seeded here hundreds of years ago. State Highway 7 runs within tramping distance of the Nina, the Hope and the Boyle rivers.  It sticks in my mind as a refuge from howling gales and rain, blown horizontal, that pursued us across the Canterbury Plains and up into the foothills of the Southern Alps.

It was the time of the last El Nino and from the rain-swollen rivers of the plains, silt-laden and unfishable, we came upon these mountain streams still running clear, though the wind sent spray blasting from pools and riffles.

The sun shone and we walked into the forest where the roar of the wind was subdued. It hissed through fine-leaved beech, only breaking into a full-throated roar when we broke cover into broad leaf and stunted scrub-covered knolls of rock and massive boulders. Then it was back to the forest and blessed quiet.

On the track a mother Canada goose was walking her brood of golden-downed youngsters, and she rushed them into the fern and mosses at our approach. They disappeared in the undergrowth and we heard the sound of water where the track dipped to meet the river. There was deer sign on the muddy banks and the animal  tracks made easy going alongside the water. From these tracks we searched for fish in the riffles, following windows of visibility downstream in between gusts of wind.
 The fish were well hidden and it took an hour or so of searching before we came to the tail of a pool where a fish cast a shadow on the stony bottom and moved to take an insect, blown to the water.

It sucked its prey from the surface, leaving a ring that widened until it was lost in the riffle at the tail of the pool. It was time to succumb to temptation. An imitation of something  terrestrial was needed, something small that could be punched through the wind with a sidecast kept low to offer little resistance. Nothing too feathery or with bushy hackle that could be distracted by the wind.

A nymph, lightly weighted, would seem ideal, but we had seen the fish rise and a dry fly would be a true imitation. In the deepest recesses of my fishing vest there was a film canister full of brown beetle imitations, tied last summer in the midst of a hatch of these pasture pests on the Motueka River . They worked then, but I doubted their effectiveness in early spring in the middle of a beech forest.

There must be a myriad of insects blown from trees into the water -- moths, spiders, flies, bees, wasps and beetles of many sorts, including wood borers and leaf eaters, as well as recently hatched mayflies, stoneflies, caddis and alder flies. They vary in size from tiny aphids to porina moths and huhu beetles. While trout can be selective if there is an abundance of one particular insect, the odds were that the sheer variety of insect life blown on to the river by the gales would render the fish careless and the fisherman fortunate.

Then there was the problem of casting. A rod that carries a weight 5 line is a pig in a head wind, but it was all I had. One day, someone will invent a secure rod carrier to hold a couple of four-piece rods that can be worn like a day pack, or even a day pack incorporating that facility. Rods these days weigh next to nothing and it’s only their fragility and size that needs to be considered.

So, I stood in the water with my light line drifting downstream while I waited for the breeze to abate and a cast to be made. It took time. The water was cold but it was a pleasant discomfort when the trout took the fly after half an hour and half a dozen casts.  From that pool we walked upstream, climbing a bluff or two before the river turned a right angle through a gorge and the wind was behind us. Now we changed flies to big Humpys and bushy, palmer-hackled bi-visibles that sailed out on the breeze and landed lightly. We took fish after fish till the sun dropped over the Alps, and the air cooled.

Depression lifted and we ate and drank that night with vigorous celebration.
It is time to do it again. I’m going to go south in search of quiet, lonely waters where forests give shelter and filter water from the hills. And in that water there are more fish than people fishing for them and you can call a river your own. 

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