What A Difference A Week Makes

New Zealand is a wild place. When you choose to immerse yourself in its wilderness, you do so at the mercy of the elements. Conditions can deteriorate rapidly, and I have experienced firsthand just how unnerving the dramatic changes in the environment can be. Setting off from the car for a day’s fishing, crossing rivers, only to find that I cannot cross back after only a few hours of seemly light rain. More than four seasons in one day, in New Zealand, it can be four seasons in a few hours. But nothing prepared me for the kind of contrast in conditions that we experienced in early February this year.

My long-time fly fishing friend Simon Hall and I had been planning a trip to the New Zealand together for nearly five years. It was to be his first time fishing the South Island, and I had joked that all of my previous trips had been selfless reconnaissance missions for the trip that we would one day take together. We planned two weeks, starting in the South and gradually making our way North, getting a little more adventurous as we went. It was to be my own ‘best of the South Island’ fishing trip, shared with one of my best mates.

In the weeks leading up to our flights across the Tasman, we were glued to the weather apps. In order to give Simon the ultimate experience, we had chosen February because of its ideal trout conditions and stable weather. Or so we thought. A fortnight before departure, a low-pressure system dropped record breaking rain on the Southland region and things started to look seriously bad. A state of emergency was called and people from surrounding areas were travelling to towns like Gore to assist with sandbagging and to do whatever they could to minimise damage from the flooding.

Mataura River valley in full flood. Photo by Lucy @ Mataura River Cottage

I checked in with a mate in Queenstown, who painted a grim picture of how this situation might play out. I was also in touch with the owner of some accommodation we had booked close to Lumsden. She sent me photos of the Mataura River valley and their farm in full flood. Completely unrecognisable, I couldn’t believe that it was possible for so much water to move down the valley like that. From what I could see I honestly thought that the damage to property, land, the river (and the fishing) might take years to recover. As I emailed to cancel our accommodation booking, the owner very casually informed me that her husband had lived in the Mataura Valley his entire life and expected the river to return to normal by the time we arrived. I could hardly believe her, but I hesitated, and we kept the booking.

Meanwhile, Simon was in touch with several people from his local fishing club, who were on a trip to Southland the week before us. It was a complete write-off for them. Days with guides were spent desperately searching for clear water and when the rivers went into full flood and towns were under threat, any chance of fishing was well and truly off the cards. It was a painful reminder that there are no guarantees when you travel to New Zealand to fish and we felt terrible for the guys.

A bridge across the Mataura River almost completely underwater. Photo by Lucy @ Mataura River Cottage

The rains stopped, and a few days later we landed in Queenstown before heading South. Within hours of being off the plane, we had done our shopping, visited the fishing shop, and were standing on the banks of the Mataura River. We excitedly unpacked our gear out of flight bags on the side of the road, and with little to no prep or set up time, we were fishing within minutes. The river was dirty, but remarkably low considering the photos we had seen from only a week earlier. The fish we saw were mainly pushed up on the edges as expected, but there were also fish in the classic backwaters, and several – including Simon’s first New Zealand Brown Trout – were sitting close to the surface in eddies created by overhanging Willows. There were enormous trees that had been moved – who knows how far down stream – and in the clearings and flats, debris was strewn from the base of one mountain to the next. Just witnessing the aftermath was enough to put us in awe of the immense power that the flood water must have possessed.

The Mataura Valley one week later

The following days we walked the lower Mataura and it was certainly obvious that it hadn’t fully recovered from the floods. As well as the carnage of uprooted trees and wrecked fences, the river was still dirty, and although each day it got slightly clearer, the fish were taking a little longer to return to their usual behaviour. We were seeing them, and that was certainly the main thing, as I would otherwise have been convinced that they had all been flushed out to sea.

With a high-pressure system upon us and ideal conditions ahead, we headed a little further afield, putting in some serious kilometres on foot. On our first day exploring some of the more remote rivers, we returned to a run close to the carpark, and stopped when we saw some shapes lying deep in the riffley water. It was really the first sign of fish we had seen, after prospecting all the likely spots in a five-kilometre stretch. In fact, the sight of the shapes almost seemed too obvious, and the nymph on a 6 foot dropper that I cast over them was only really a semi-serious lob-and-hope, before we retired to the car to find a better spot. The big dry I was using as an indicator dipped and I couldn’t believe the power of the 7 pound fish that I had hooked. We then proceeded to pull 5 fish from the exact same spot, all super hungry and aggressive. These fish were stacked up, recovering from the floods and ready to eat just about anything. We then had a new approach, target deeper runs, sometimes with some of those flies made from red pipe cleaners (did I just admit to that?), and we pretty much couldn’t lose.

After a 5km walk and only a few fish seen, we hook up on five from the same run, right next to the car park

Then came more good weather. Temperatures in the mid-twenties and clear skies. We certainly felt #blessed, especially when the fish started to come up off the bottom and turning their attention to dry flies. It was the summer of the (now legendary) 2019/2020 Mouse Year. It was February, and these fish had just spent the better part of two weeks bunkering down and trying to avoid being washed out to Stewart Island. We tied on our biggest and most buoyant dries; big Cicadas, big Blowflies, Swishers PMXs, and we hucked them out into the main current, to be aggressively slashed at by big browns and even some beautifully conditioned South Island Rainbows.

Being a Mouse Year, I had a personal goal in the back of my mind prior to the trip. Land a trophy Brown. I have travelled to the South Island fairly frequently over the past 7 years and put in a lot of leg-work. A fish over the magic 10 pound mark was something that had eluded me, and I had hoped that this might be the trip to make it a reality. Like most of my expeditions in New Zealand, I had been planning this one for nearly six months. Poring over Google Earth to find new places to explore, I had high hopes for some of the locations further North, but this first week in Southland was just a warm up. A place for Simon to get his eye in, before we got into the serious backcountry stuff.

The look of relief after my first New Zealand trophy brown comes to hand

On day four of our so called warm up week, we decided to camp the night at Mavora Lakes to try our hand at mouse fishing. We chose an idyllic evening; pitch dark, the wind dropping back to almost nothing, and we could hear the spectacular splashes of large trout attempting to drown mice swimming across the lake nearby. Overhead the stars were unbelievably bright, and we even witnessed Elon Musk’s satellites come across the sky, 35 in a direct row.

Fishing at night soon proved frustrating, like learning to cast a fly rod all over again. One of the civilised aspects to fishing in New Zealand is that the ideal hours are somewhere between 9am and 4pm. Reminded of this, we retrieved our mouse patterns from the trees for the last time and headed to bed.

An aggressive Mavora Rainbow on a mouse pattern. Definitely more fun during the day than at night!

The following day we planned to fish the Oreti River, but word had obviously got out and literally every beat had a car parked at it by 8am. So instead we decided to explore a little further and take in a new river that I had not fished before. It proved to be fishing extremely well, and we had several fish above 5 pounds in the net before lunch. The fish were holding in the deeper runs, and they were few and far between, so we ended up covering nearly ten kilometres that day.

In the early afternoon, walking along in single file on a grassy bank, I stopped dead when I caught the movement of a serious fish only a few metres ahead, right below the bank. After taking a rough bearing on where it was sitting, we dropped back so that the bank blocked our view of the fish. With a shallow dropper, I cast only five or so meters ahead and a foot from the bank. The flies drifted back, as I saw a shadow swing out and the dry fly dip. It was the Brown I had been searching for, an old brute, 10.5lb in the weigh net.

Our final day marked almost a week since we had arrived, and Southland was getting very busy. Many of the marked accesses were claimed early in the morning, so we decided to embark on a big expedition on foot. A 10 kilometre walk in and out, put us on a remote stretch of river that had probably not seen another angler since before the floods. Despite the clear conditions, we were forced to fish into a blistering Norwest wind, and while we hooked up on a few beautiful fish, only one made it to the net. That fish happened to be an 11.5lb Brown on a Simon’s dry fly.

Not bad first his first trip! Simon lands an 11.5lb Brown on a dry fly, after a big day on foot

And so, our week ended in Southland and we travelled North for a change of scenery. In terms of the fish we had caught, the trip had already surpassed expectations and that was before we got to what I thought would be the good bit. We were reminded of how dramatically different our experience could have been, and how lucky we were to be in the right place at the right time. The contrast between our trip and that of the guys that were there just one week before us was vast. It illustrated how unpredictable New Zealand can be, and how much is at stake when you plan trips a few months or even a year in advance. Timing is everything, and even well thought out, expensive trips can be written off, even at the most stable climatic times of the year. It also made me think about how one could capitalise on this kind of situation if you had the luxury of flexibility. If you see the weather coming and put yourself there when it clears and the water drops, the fishing will undoubtably be phenomenal.  

Rain in the headwaters can soon mean rising water levels downstream

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