Each year around whitebaiting season, at least once, I like to take some streamer flies for a swim down in the lower reaches of our rivers and quite often its the Grey. Trout seem to know very well what ‘bait looks like, so a pattern similar to the species often does the trick. Normally I wait till the season ends so I don’t engender the wrath of those looking to capture a shoal.
Mind you some of them quite like the idea of an angler coming along when there’s a fish or two tearing into the whitebait and breaking up the precious shoals. “Yeah I’ll be pleased if you can get rid of it for me” is something I’ve heard from time to time, but mostly I steer clear and head above the back marker, beyond which no whitebaiting is allowed, before casting a suitable pattern into the tidal influenced water.
At this time of year I frequently recall the 1970s when on my Wife’s parent’s farm in Southland. Their land backed onto a massive estuary fed by 2 rivers with both holding trout and both having whitebait making their way upstream each Spring. It was a fascinating experience of an evening, when the push of the tide inundated the stands of reeds to provide a hiding place for healthy looking trout to await a shoal and then ambush them with a splashy swirl as they wriggled by. Until that moment the trout sat motionless in the shallow water, with the only movement being their dorsal fin waving ever so slightly in the breath of the light evening air. At that stage I was still doing some threadlining and was fond of a small silver ‘ticer, but the fish were too darn easy to catch when they were on the lookout for whitebait. It seemed to be rather unsporting so I’d just go down to watch the action as an interested bystander, rather than “shoot fish in a barrel.”
These days we enjoy life on The West Coast but when chasing trout that are chasing whitebait, sometimes things don’t go entirely as planned. One time I was at the mouth of the Taramakau river when I saw a flurry of bait rippling the water, followed by what I thought was a sizeable trout. Aha says I, this’ll be easy as I flicked a lure out in the general direction. The fishing gods felt it was time for a giggle at my expense as the large fish suddenly struck. The battle was a good one – around the estuary, out through the mouth, south along the coastline a ways and then I managed to hold it’s flight a bit off- shore. I worked it closer and closer until I caught the first glimpse of this weighty number as it fell off the face of a wave, landing on the sand of the steeply sloping beach. Without a second thought, I rushed down to the fish, grabbing it a millisecond before the gaping maw of a giant wave crashed down and closed over me. It was a very close thing, but then I registered it was not a trout but a 6 pound kahawai and as the rueful plod up the beach continued I’m sure I could hear snatches of maniacal laughter from the mischievious deities. Oh well it was good protein so I took it back home, bunged it in the oven to bake it for dinner, filling the place with a very strong smell of fish, much to the “delight” of my Wife when she arrived home from work. Naturally she didn’t want to eat it and perhaps the less said about that episode the better, as she made me write a retraction in Coastlines on another occasion after I’d transgressed in some perceived fashion. Her Mother said on our wedding day almost half a century ago “It won’t be dull Ivan.” She was right!
Back to whitebait and trout – most all of the rivers have action for anglers when the ‘bait arrives to course upstream and another location that has a large estuary flowing to the ocean is Okarito. Us local lads have gone there whitebaiting but have also targeted trout with success. Of course bait doesn’t stop just because the season closes, in fact a common complaint is that they run in great numbers after the end of the season. They appear to be present for a large amount of the year and one time we were in Okarito, ostensibly after salmon, when I took a very nice 5- 6 pounder only a few metres upstream from where the water flowed into the sea.
The outcome of this year’s baiting of the trout on the Grey river with an appropriate Grey Ghost, was a couple of trout which were not large, but in quite nice condition. That’ll do me for now I thought – back into the boat for some floating stalks around lake margins next, but that’ll be another story for another day.
