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Seans' Saturday adventure.
Mon 5th October, 2015
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A big thank you to Sean Seamer for taking the trouble to send me this report on his latest fishing trip.
We're more used to seeing Sean hooked up on his favorite river ... the Tongariro. But its a long drive from Auckland so last weekend desperate for his "fly fishing fix" he went exploring nearer home.
Here’s Sean's full report on Saturdays adventure!
 Went fishing on Saturday morning.
I probably should’ve just come down to Turangi because I drove the 1hr 45mins down to the Mangatutu stream, just south of Te Awamutu, to find it completely flooded and brown. I didn’t realise they had had that much rain in the Waikato.
I thought perhaps the Waipa was handling it better in the upper reaches so drive down to Otorohonga and then all the way up to the Toa Bridge only to find it flooded too.
Unfortunately after a run in with Fish & Game over dairy farming practices, the farmer doesn’t let anyone go up river any more ... so I was out of luck there too.
 
Figured my only shot at some clearer water was to get in to the upper reaches of a river. So bit the bullet and drove on for an extra hour to river X.
Sure enough, it was flooded and brown by the time it got to SH3, but given I’d come this far I thought it was worth the drive up in to the valley.
It did get clearer by the the time I got up there despite the high flows and by the time I got to the end of the road it was fishable. I didn’t realise that it was private land and you needed permission from the land owner to access the river.
I managed to find him and he said "no worries", but didn’t want me going any further in to the upper reaches and asked me to fish down the road. Bugger. I suspect he might have had a deal with a guide. Seeing an opportunity to strike up a relationship with the guy I asked him if he ate trout. He said he was definitely a meat eater, so I promised to keep him a fish.
30mins later at the first pool I came to I had a gleaming silver three pounder taken on a bead head H&C.
I have to say I surprised myself. I was thinking that I was going to struggle on a river I knew nothing about and using different rigs to the Tongariro. I bopped it on the head quick and clean and delivered it to a smiling farmer. 
Thirty minutes later, at the riffle between the first pool and the one below, I took a lovely 5lb rainbow jack on my new 4wt using a deleatidium. Off your dry and dropper rig of course. New rod officially broken in.
I was thinking… wow! this could be worth the four hours of driving! (to be fair its three hours if I had gone direct)
Bugger me if it didn’t dry up though.
Despite fishing some very likely water with both methods I couldn’t get in touch. I saw some may coming off the surface, but no rises. I swapped to a deleatidium emerger, but no luck there. The hatch was probably too slight and the water too murky for them to really get on to a feed.
It become clear that in these smaller rivers you need to keep on the move. Anything you hook will spook the other fish in the little pools and the fish population is probably a lot sparser than what I’m used to in Turangi. So I started moving faster and I quickly covered a lot of water for little reward. I did hook up one very impressive fish but within seconds it had shaken the hook.
A couple of hours and fly changes later and I was back to the bead head H&C. Found another likely looking pool and managed to pull out two nice little fish at around 2lb.
I'd also pinched another method of yours, and put some cold beers in a cooler in the back of the car and it was about now that they were calling me. First day on a murky and slightly flooded river X had scored me 4 fish in about 5 hours so the beer tasted pretty good.
Tight lines
Sean |
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