It was one of those wonderful West Coast Winter days, but the lead up didn’t bode so well.
Snow warnings went out for the mountain passes and we wondered if our relatives, my brother in law and his wife, would be able to get through the Southern Alps from the city. They duly arrived and closer inspections of the weather charts began, with the Sunday of the weekend looking the most likely day for Allan and I to go for a visit to Lake Brunner. He brought 2 of the rods he makes out of the vehicle and placed them on the back deck along with his bag of bits, ready to go in the boat the next morning. A word about his rods – they’re magical wands, wonderful to use and are a credit to him (in case he reads this!!!)
We’d decided to keep gentlemen’s hours, so set off at 10am for the half hour run to the lake and the drive up was uneventful apart from quite an amount of thick mist, which I remarked was a good sign as it would be clear and sunny lakeside. So it proved to be and with money in the ramp’s honesty box and us in our life jackets, we gurgled quietly out past the 5 knot buoys, then it was power on as we zoomed towards the favoured spot, where my earlier fishing mate Gary (He of the F Word) and I regularly would begin our days with a prospecting cast or two. It was easily identifiable by the 2 dead trees standing in the water a bit out from the others and oddly, after Gary suddenly passed, very much to our shock, it became just 1 tree. Still miss the man.
For an hour or so we poked around up amongst the trees, where the lake had risen after some severe rain a few days earlier, looking for telltale signs – a fin here, a swirl there, but we were not seeing fish. Time for a change of location. We motored to the outer end of the bay to moor up in a sunny, sheltered corner, have lunch and then utilising the light airs that were coming from a convenient direction, we intended to drift back along the lake edges. As we had almost finished our sandwiches, I remarked that the tradition of a fish appearing while we focused on eating, had not been upheld, but Allan reminded me we hadn’t quite finished and with that, a smallish trout appeared by the boat.
Once refreshed we set off exploring for fish again, but apart from a few that took off from the shallows into deeper water as we approached, we were still not seeing that many, so we also decided to go out to deeper water. I rowed as Alan fished and he was keen for me to have some casts so we swapped and I tried the 4 weight he’d built. He also had one of his own ties attached to the tippet and about that time Welcome Swallows started flitting and dipping across the water, indicating there might be a bit of a hatch happening in the pleasant temperatures. Shortly we saw the odd rise and one which was nearer the boat had me casting his newly created fly out in it’s direction. The take was subtle but definite and so I quickly handed the rod to Allan to play while I grabbed the rubber meshed landing net. Suddenly he said the fish had gone and I asked where and he told me it was off. Was it played too hard?, was the line allowed to go slack briefly?, but we decided it was just bad luck. Allan got the fly back, which was perhaps good luck, but that had a less desirable outcome, which he eventually realised early the next morning, when Allan informed me he’d worked out why we didn’t get any more takes, because when the last hookup occurred, the fish helped us with a “strategic mid-lake release,” but the fly had “moulted” during the fight, losing it’s wing feathers, leaving only the body and tail, so looked a lot different, thus no more fish showed interest. Some things take time to work out, but it was good thinking and explained things nicely. Either that or it was just one of our fisherman’s excuses!
We’d continued to cast to rising fish which had no interest in the fly as we moved along the lake edge and at that stage I thought a wee pheas’ tail nymph might have improved things, but time was a-marching on and I thought the winter chill would soon creep back to our discomfort, so we fired up the Yarmy and fizzed back to the ramp. As it was, when we were driving away from the bay the temperature reading on the car’s display was still 10 degrees, so we could’ve stayed a bit longer, but our wives had suggested we get back at 4pm, so after a pleasant run home in the sun discussing what had been a very nice day out, we arrived back an hour late at 5 o’clock. No husbands were harmed in the making of this story!
