Articles

New Zealand at last - Part II

Part II of our look at South Island travel.

by Jay Cassell - Wednesday, Apr 8th, 2015

Guide Brent Piri with a silvery New Zealand rainbow trout.

Maori Magic

After fishing with van da Loo, I caught an Air New Zealand island hopper to Wellington, the capital, and went on to Taupo. There, I fished the Tauranga-Taupo River with guide Brent Pirie, a spry 50-year-old who has been guiding in the North Island for 14 years. The freestone river, not as well known as the nearby Tongariro, gave up some really fat, healthy rainbows on the fly, my largest going over 6 pounds. I spied that one rising 2 inches off a rock wall in what is known as the Cliff Pool, and was able to plop my fly, a spidery looking thing called a Turks Tarantula, right into his feeding lane. His dogged fight, with hard runs up and down the pool, almost breaking me off on an underwater log, was just spectacular.

Brent and I had fished on Maori forest land, hiking to the river through a dense forest of fir trees and lupin and Toi Toi bushes, the latter characterized with white, streaming, brush-like heads. We hit many deep, fishy looking pools as we went. The Maoris, who came to New Zealand from Polynesia in 1280, before the Europeans even knew it existed, make up 14 percent of the country’s population today. Their rich culture is found everywhere, from the loud, exotic native dances (called “Kapa haka”), to haunting music performed with trumpets (“putatara”) and wooden flutes (“koauau”) that are played through the nostril, to native delicacies such as fish wrapped and steamed in peppery taro leaves in a “Hangi,” or pit fire.

New Zealand at last - Part I

A look at fly fishing travel to a top bucket list destination.

by Jay Cassell - Monday, Apr 6th, 2015

Guide Paul van da Loo on the Motueka River.

There was no denying it the day was going downhill. I was fishing the Wairau River, a pristine wilderness stream that rose in the evergreen-blanketed Saint Arnaud Range on New Zealand’s South Island, then wound and snaked its way through narrow gorges and valleys for 150 kilometres before reaching the Pacific. It was a gorgeous late-summer day, with temperatures in the 70s, not a cloud in the sky. I was standing in water so clean and pure you could drink it; 20 yards ahead, water was cascading through as pretty a riffle as you’d ever want to see, flowing into a deep, azure-blue turn pool. Such pools, as I’d discovered in the past few hours, often held at least one trophy brown trout, fish that averaged 4 pounds and went up to 8 or 9.

Behind me, my guide, Paul van da Loo, wiped a grimace off his face, and remarked, “Well, let’s hike up to the next pool. That fish you just missed isn’t coming back.”

And so it had gone that morning. In the first two pools, I had struck too slowly when my dry fly strike indicator suddenly disappeared beneath the water, the trout below spitting out my No. 18 gray nymph well before my reaction. Then, at the next pool, I piled up my 18-foot leader right on top of a trout sitting behind a midstream boulder, sending him fleeing from the pool as if the Forces of Darkness were attacking. Later, I lined another fish. When I finally did hook one, a monster that had to go at least 7 pounds, his downstream run out of the pool was so powerful that I broke him off in seconds.

Barracuda, bonefish on decline in the Florida Keys

by Mike Hodge - Friday, Apr 3rd, 2015

Photo: Dan Decibel

Bonefish are on the decline in the Florida Keys. So are the fish that eat them. Barracuda, once a traditional target of winter flats fishing, are now scarce.

“I just started guiding in 2000, which is not long in the whole scheme of things,” Key West guide John O’ Hearn said. “In the winter you could go to any flat and have a few cudas on it, even if it wasn’t a good flat. You could go anywhere and there would be barracudas. Over the years, you had to get better and better [at finding them]. There are places still with good barracuda fishing. You just have to keep working harder and harder.”

With so few fish, O’Hearn and other colleagues in the Lower Keys Guides Association started a Save the Barracuda Campaign and urged the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission to implement harvest regulations to protect the saltwater predator.

Half-pounders in Sasquatch country

"I want to report a bigfoot encounter."

by Chris Hunt - Thursday, Apr 2nd, 2015

It was a typically misty autumn night in October 1998, and I was busy putting the Times-Standard newspaper to bed along with handful of folks on the copy desk when the phone rang.

“Newsroom,” I answered quickly, annoyed that someone would be calling within minutes of the copy deadline.

“Yeah,” a shaky male voice on the other end of the line said, somewhat hesitantly. “Is this the newspaper in Eureka?”

“Yep,” I said, phone to my ear, eye on the newsroom clock.

“I want to report a Bigfoot encounter.”

Jill, guys from GEOFISH finally kick some bass

by Mike Hodge - Wednesday, Apr 1st, 2015

Jill on location in Belize for GEOFISH.

Brian Jill has fished more than two dozen countries far and wide. Big Bass in Mexico? Check. Majestic Browns in New Zealand? Check. Tantalizing tarpon in the Yucatan? Check. If there are big fish to be caught, chances are Jill and his three best buds have found a way to film it. First, there was the Trout Bum Diaries, then GEOFISH and GEOBASS, which was released in 2014.

But there’s more. Jill says the crew wants to continue to churn out sequels of GEOBASS, which initially featured trips to Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua, Botswana and Papua New Guinea among others.

“You’d think we’d be burned out on traveling,” Jill said. “I don’t know. We get a chance to come home [and recharge]. It’s in our blood to keep looking for (new places). It’s that explorer gene. That’s the best way we can explain it really, when people ask us. It’s that explorer gene that’s inside of us that needs to see what’s around the next corner and what’s out there.”