A Fly Fisherman’s Paradise : Giant Trout Are in New Zealand, Where Primitive Streams Await

SOUTH ISLAND, New Zealand —  The water erupted in crystal explosions over the rocks and gravel of the tiny creek. Above it stood heart-stopping Mt. Awful, a magnificent, jagged and horribly misnamed mountain capped by a gleaming band of snow in the late Southern Hemisphere summer. Alongside the stream stretched miles of tall field grasses and stunningly bright wildflowers waving briskly in the wind like a billion choreographed dancers.

All that would have been interesting to fly fisherman Bill Hoyt, had he not been a bit preoccupied. Instead of being allowed to enjoy the scenery, he was, it seemed, on the verge of being dragged by his weary arm about 20 miles downstream into the Tasman Sea by one very large, very upset, hook-jawed and wild rainbow trout.

Nearly 20 minutes after the trout had inhaled Hoyt’s dry fly off the surface of the creek, it seemed the fish was winning the battle. He had already taken Hoyt and guide Owen King nearly a mile down the creek. Hoyt had lost his hat to the wind halfway into the tussle. King had landed on the seat of his pants once as the sparkling rainbow sizzled past his feet in the frigid water, sending the guide stumbling backwards along slick rocks.

And still the trout strained hard against the wispy leader and refused to be turned in the shallow but swift water. At every approach of the scrambling Hoyt or the net-clutching King, the silver fish with the crimson slash running the length of its body would fan its broad and powerful tail and bolt over a small waterfall or under a cut bank, always heading downstream and pausing to rest only when he felt sure his two pursuers--in all likelihood the only men he had ever encountered in this vast and remote place--had been left far behind.

Finally, the strain of the four-pound test line pulling against the tiny hook in his jaw began to wear the fish down. His dashes became weaker and he paused to rest more often, sulking in the quiet water behind giant brown rocks. He fought until the end, though, frothing the surface by shaking his big head violently.

Only when King slid the mesh of the handmade, wooden net under the fish’s huge body did he stop fighting, turning on his side with gills heaving mightily as he tried to revive by sucking precious oxygen from the water.

The fish was 26 inches long and weighed a shade over six pounds. It had lived most of its life in this valley, one of the most rugged and inaccessible places on earth, in great peace. With no natural predators to fall upon him with sharp talons from the sky or to pounce on him from the bank of the creek, and with few men to entice him with deadly flies or lures, he grew quickly.

But now, at the hands of most anglers, he would die. The fish of a lifetime tends to end up on a plaque in a den, a bizarre yet beautiful monument to a moment a fisherman wants never to forget.

But Hoyt and King were different. There would be no plaque, no death. Quickly they worked to pop the hook from the fish’s jaw. A photograph was taken. And cradled in King’s gentle hands the glistening rainbow trout was lowered into a quiet pool of the creek and held still as he pumped the oxygen back into his body.

Then, with a single flick of his massive tail, he was gone, slicing through a shallow riffle and back upstream--a wise, old trout now a bit wiser.

“A wee fat one he was,” said King, 29, his New Zealand accent sending the words dancing off his tongue. He had been a part of such scenes perhaps 500 times as angler and guide, but his broad smile said plainly that the thrill of these encounters still overpowered him.

Hoyt and King had departed from Dick Fraser’s Cedar Lodge north of Queenstown just a few hours earlier, blasting over the tops of the New Zealand Alps in Fraser’s helicopter at 100 m.p.h. before settling softly in the grassy valley and then clutching their hats tightly as the helicopter roared away, leaving them a minute later in absolute solitude--a 30-minute helicopter ride or, for anyone foolish enough to attempt it, a blistering, four-day hike away from the lodge.

The stream they would fish this day was remarkable. That a thriving population of giant, wild trout could exist in such a stream, a creek no wider than six feet and in most places only a foot or two deep, was mind-boggling to visitors. In North America, such a tiny creek would at best hold a few tiny trout, six and eight-inch fish.

But here, feeding voraciously on insects and undisturbed by humans for months and sometimes years at a time, the fish grew to outlandish size.

And as their size increased over the years, so did their survival instincts. Anything that occurred in or around a trout’s home water that seemed the least bit unnatural would send them into retreat. A person walking, no matter how quietly, along the bank would send a fish away in panic. A fly line cast too far and flashing ever so slightly over their heads in the sunlight would make them nearly leap from the water in terror. A fly landing a bit too heavily upon the water would have the same effect.

Even a fly presented perfectly to a feeding fish would often be ignored because the fish was, at the time, feeding on another type of insect.

It was a pursuit that could make even veteran fly fishermen such as Hoyt, who has spent a lifetime perfecting the art on some of the greatest trout rivers in America, shout in frustration.

“This is definitely a doctorate’s lesson in fly fishing,” said Hoyt, of Studio City, owner of an insurance company in Beverly Hills and a sprawling cattle ranch in Montana. It was his first visit to the lush island for the famed trout fishing.

“I’ve fly fished for 40 years or more, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “Ever.”

The difficulty of making a perfect cast and remaining calm enough to set the hook with the perfect movement of the hand and the fly rod at just the right moment was enormous. A reporter was given four chances one morning in a quiet stream flowing through a vast stretch of farmland. He came up empty.

The first cast was only slightly off target, but spooked the fish as if the angler had dropped an anvil into the stream. The second, third and fourth attempts were near-perfect, and all brought the desired response.

However, the sight of gigantic trout rising from the bottom of a clear stream and opening their cavernous mouths just inches below the floating fly sent adrenaline raging through the angler. As the second fish neared the fly, the angler’s tension level soared off the chart. He jerked the fly away from the bewildered trout, bringing the tiny Royal Wulff whizzing past his ear in a tangle of line.

After making adequate casts to each of the next two fish, the reporter forced himself to wait the extra second until the fish had the fly firmly in his mouth. At that moment, proper technique calls for a quick but very gentle backwards snap of the wrist, exerting just enough force on the micro-thin leader to imbed the hook in the fish’s mouth while keeping the leader intact.

He accomplished half of those requirements. The hook, without question, was firmly planted in the fish’s mouth. The anxiety level of the moment, however, caused a full-arm jerk of the rod and so much strain on the light line that it broke. The anchor chain of the Queen Mary also might have snapped by a similar motion.

“A bit excited, are we?” asked the guide, unable to hide a smile.

The same thing happened with yet another fish. Few things in fishing could be as frustrating.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of New Zealand fly fishing is the stalk. Unlike anyplace else in the world, where the fly is presented either to rising trout on the surface or fished blind to likely fish-holding spots in a river, the New Zealand approach is to cast only to a trout that can be seen, often hugging the river bottom.

The gin-clear water of most every river is both a blessing and curse. Its remarkable clarity necessitates a warning to the wading newcomers.

“If the water looks to be two feet deep, step in a bit slowly,” cautioned Ray Grubb, a master fly fisherman and owner of the Lake Brunner Lodge in the middle of the breathtaking South Island. “If it appears to be three feet deep to you, you don’t wanna’ be stepping in it at all.”

Water that appears to be no more than three feet deep often plunges six and eight feet to the gravel bottom of some of the most beautiful river pools in the world. Many an overconfident foreign angler has gone bobbing down a New Zealand river, submerged to the brim of his hat in water he was sure wouldn’t be over his thighs.

The trained eyes of guides such as Grubb and King and young Zane Mirfin at Lake Rotoroa Lodge further north on the island are able to spot fish with a marvelous consistency. They fish only during the brightest hours of the day, donning Polaroid sunglasses to wait for the high sun to fully illuminate the rivers.

The slightest extra ripple in the fast-moving water, or a spot of trout-like color amid the brown and white and beige rocks, or sometimes just the shape of a trout lying perfectly still behind a rock will send the guides to their knees, camouflage clothes blending with shrubs along the bank in downstream retreat to plan strategy for each fish.

And at these moments, when guide and angler discuss a plan to take a giant trout, the distinct New Zealand accent sometimes raises a nearly insurmountable obstacle for Americans.

“He’s a big one,” guide and lodge owner Grubb said to an angler from South Carolina a few years ago during one of these strategy sessions. “He’s feeding the bottom, so we’ll go with the whited nymph. Got a big, whited nymph?”

The Southern fisherman rummaged frantically through his fishing vest and pulled out his box of artificial flies. Like a man possessed, Grubb recalled, the angler searched for the nymph--the underwater, emerging stage of an insect--as Grubb stared trance-like at the the seven-pound brown trout in the river.

“Ain’t got nuthin’ with white,” the angler called to Grubb. “Got some with yeller and some with gray, but nothin’ with any white.”

“Don’t care about that. Give me the one with the most white ,” Grubb responded. “He’s feeding on the bottom.”

At this point, things got confusing.

“Told’ja, ain’t got nothin’ with white,” the South Carolinian angler said. “Got some big ol’ heavy nymphs, though.”

Grubb was now perplexed, wondering how this American with the bizarre accent could have no flies with white in them but yet have some heavy ones.

“Just pick out the one with the most white,” Grubb implored, as the giant, feeding trout continued to pounce on any bug that drifted within three feet of him.

On and on the exchange went until the frustrated guide stalked back to his angler, pulled a heavy nymph from his fly box and screeched, “This one! This one! A whited nymph.”

It had a lead strand against the hook--some weight.

“I believe I about went bonkers that day,” Grubb told two other American guests. “I mean, all you Yanks talk pretty odd to us, but this gent, well, I imagine he would have sounded pretty strange even to you. Wee bad accent he had.”

The New Zealand accent, described by another guide as, “Just like Australian, but quite a bit different, really,” is one of many charms in this majestic, unspoiled country.

Composed of the north and south islands, New Zealand is the size of California with a population of only 3.3 million people. And 70 million sheep. Nearly 900,000 people live in Auckland and 325,000 more in Wellington, both on the north island. The rest are scattered over the lush landscape.

How scattered? Enough for a South Island fishing guide to complain bitterly one day that the best rivers were getting, by New Zealand standards, overrun.

“Just a few months ago I was on this river and laid back for a rest,” he said, “and glanced over at the trail and found a boot print. Someone else had been there. I’d never seen that happen before.”

On the South Island, which stretches more than 600 miles from Cape Farewell at the northern end to Stewart Island off the southern tip and is roughly 140 miles wide, only Christchurch (300,000) and Dunedin (107,000) have populations of more than 100,000.

Driving about 60 miles without seeing a building or telephone pole along the country’s main highway is not unusual. And driving that far without seeing more than a dozen cars is not unusual, either.

For that, most American tourists are very happy. There is nothing to send the adrenaline soaring and give a driver that stunned, deer-in-the-headlights look more than driving a car from the wrong side of the dashboard along the wrong side of the road at 75 miles an hour and rounding a curve to see a speeding vehicle headed at you from the other wrong side of the road.

Because of the lack of traffic, there are few crashes. Fraser, the helicopter pilot and owner of Cedar Lodge, has another explanation.

“We’ve all been trained since birth to spot those damn baseball caps,” he said. “We know when we see a baseball cap coming at us there is a damn American behind it, and we pull smartly off the roadway until you pass. You are the only people in the world who wear the bloody things.”

A sampling of the fly fishing of South Island was directed by Mike McLelland, of Los Angeles. McLelland, an avid fly fisherman who has journeyed to some of the most remote corners of the world in search of trout, sampled the South Island trout fishing a few years ago and has sent many American anglers for the adventure he found.

After the 13-hour flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, the trip continues with a short flight from Auckland to the New Zealand capital of Wellington on the south shore of the North Island. From there a shorter flight brings anglers across a narrow strip of the Tasman Sea to the South Island town of Nelson.

And then, for Hoyt and a companion on a recent visit, came the rental car and the first real blast of a different world.

“You’re in luck today, gentlemen. We’ve got you a Bluebird,” announced the car rental agent.

The steering wheel was on the right side and the first attempt by the American driver to shift it into gear resulted in him nearly yanking the window handle off the door.

Lake Rotoroa Lodge, nestled in the Nelson Lakes National Park in the northern third of the South Island, is an old Victorian lodge owned by ex-banker Bob Haswell, who traded his life of walking through a bank for one in which he can live on one. Lake Rotoroa sweeps westward from his doorstep before it collides with the Tasman Mountains.

From Lake Rotoroa flows the Gowan River, and it doesn’t take long to understand how good the fishing in the area might be. As Hoyt and his fishing partner crossed a wooden bridge leading to the lodge, an enormous brown trout emerged from the shadows that dappled across the Gowan.

When this item was rather excitedly reported moments later to Haswell, he replied, “Oh. That would be Trevor.”

Trevor, it seems, has called the water under the bridge home for several years. Many have tried to catch him. All have failed. Trevor knows in an instant the difference between a fat, living bug and a steel hook covered with pheasant feathers and deer hair. Trevor, like the other giant trout that cruise a dozen nearby rivers, is no fool.

At Lake Rotoroa Lodge an angler will also encounter guide Mirfin, a 20-year-old New Zealander who has spent nearly all of his life staring into the area’s rivers, spotting outlandishly large trout and learning how to catch them on a fly. His ability to spot often motionless trout in crystal clear but deep and riffled water was amazing. And each time his eyes brought a 5 or 6 or 7-pound trout into focus, a ritual would begin.

For three days, Hoyt, with fly rod in hand, trailed Mirfin alongside the spectacular rivers. And about 15 times a day, Mirfin would pause, stare at a spot in the river and then take a slow, deliberate backward step.

The backward step meant fish, and he would then crouch and creep back to the waiting angler and begin a strategy session.

At one such stop on the sometimes-raging Rolling River, in a spot with a rock face towering 500 feet above one side of the river and a tropical jungle forming an uneasy truce with the water on the other, Hoyt cast to a six-pound brown trout.

The fish moved sharply towards the tiny nymph as it drifted toward him and effortlessly inhaled the artificial insect. In a second, Hoyt’s graphite rod bent nearly double and the fish began a pulsating run upstream. Slowly he came back to the angler, and soon Mirfin had slid his net under the fish and raised him high with a joyous whoop.

It was a moment, he said, that he could never tire of.

“People cannot realize until they fish here just how challenging these brown trout are,” he said. “They punish you severely if you do anything wrong, and only reward you if you do everything right. And I mean absolutely everything right. When you catch one of these trout on a fly, you have achieved something.”

Day after day, Mirfin showed an uncanny ability to spot fish where his anglers saw only rocks and water. Often, his guests’ inability to see what he was seeing brought him great amusement. Following another of his backward steps on the Tiraumea River, after he determined that the bulging brown trout that he had spotted was not feeding and was therefore uncatchable, he brought two anglers alongside the fish and pointed.

“There!” he exclaimed, pointing at a spot at the tail of a heavy riffle.

The anglers saw gravel.

“Right there !” he then barked, taking a fly rod and pointing emphatically.

The anglers saw more gravel.

Mirfin plunged the tip of the fly rod into the fast water and shouted, “ Right there . Just six inches from the tip of the bloody rod!”

More gravel was spotted by his companions, who now feared blindness.

“Watch this,” a grinning Mirfin then announced, jabbing the rod tip until it collided with a large pile of brown gravel, a pile nearly 25 inches long that nearly jumped out of its scales as it flashed downstream, sending a gush of water as it cracked the surface with all the subtlety of Roseanne Barr hitting the deep end of a pool from a motel balcony.

Mirfin turned towards the two sheepish anglers and asked, “Did we maybe see anything then?”

The guides at Lake Rotoroa tell the ultimate big fish story all of their guests. When drifting nymphs below the surface, a common practice is to tie a tiny piece of wool yarn to the line about three feet above the fly. When the trout inhales the fly, the floating yarn--referred to as a strike indicator--will stop dead in the flowing river, telling the angler it’s time to set the hook.

“In New Zealand,” Mirfin announced, “the trout are so big we use live sheep as indicators. When the sheep goes under, you better be settin’ the hook.”

Roughly 100 miles further south, after Highway 6 turns westward and then runs along the Tasman Sea past the towns of Westport and Runanga and Greymouth, Highway 73 turns inland to the farmlands surrounding Lake Brunner, where Ray Grubb and his wife Marian van der Goes own and operate Lake Brunner Lodge.

Gone are the swift rivers and sometimes exhausting effort required to fish much of the Rotoroa area, a territory in which Mirfin, Hoyt and another angler were one day forced to crawl more than 20 minutes along mud-caked goat trails through thorny blackberry vines to skirt a stretch of the wild Karamea River.

In the rich valley rimming Lake Brunner are clear spring creeks that flow gently through the grasslands and boast giant fish. Earlier this year, a 17-pound trout was pulled from Lake Brunner. Such fish use the creeks as spawning grounds.

Grubb, who spent 20 years in the New Zealand government’s diplomatic corps, has become a master guide in these sparkling creeks and rivers, scanning the water at great distances, inching along tediously several yards back from the bank and regularly spotting feeding trout far upstream.

After spotting one, Grubb takes the word meticulous to new heights in planning a capture. First, he melts into the grasses and shrubs along the bank, not easy for a 6-foot-6 man. Then, when he’s sure the fish hasn’t noticed any movement, he retreats to his anglers and sits down.

“Time to put together a theory,” he announced after one such stop.

The theory begins with the length and strength of the leader to be tied to the heavy fly line. If the fish is feeding actively in riffled water, Grubb might use 10 or 12 feet of five-pound test leader. But if the fish is feeding cautiously in clear and unbroken water, the length of the leader can increase drastically and the strength of the leader can be decreased just as drastically.

Then, after he has spent several minutes analyzing the fish, Grubb will select what he thinks to be a match for what the trout is feeding on. After that he determines the perfect spot from which the angler will cast.

The process often takes as long as 20 minutes, during which the angler is nearly frothing, trying to control adrenaline surges and fighting the urge to bellow at Grubb, “C’MON! Hurry Up!”

But Grubb knows there is no hurry. With nothing to disturb it, the fish will continue to feed. And Grubb knows that often there will be only one cast to the fish. If it is perfect, the fish will take the fly. If it is not, he will flash his giant tail and be gone.

But once, Grubb showed persistence and determination as he coached an angler behind a gorging trout that shunned a dozen artificial offerings but refused to leave his deep hole in the river or stop feeding on real insects.

The battle appeared over, until Grubb fashioned a long leader, 20 feet or more, of three-pound test line and attached a tiny dry fly to the end. The arm-weary angler, who had watched with Grubb as the six-pound trout had rushed at several previous offerings, only to turn away at the last instant, cast the fly on the thread-thin leader, and this time the fish hit savagely and was solidly hooked.

For the 15 seconds it took the huge brown trout to bull his way to a nearby log buried in the river bed and protruding a foot above the surface. There, the fish made a quick circle, wrapped the thin leader around the log and snapped it.

The hour-long ordeal was, suddenly, over.

“Smart old bloke,” Grubb said quietly, nodding toward the still water, toward a spot where a very wild fish still swam.

Further south, at Fraser’s Cedar Lodge in the tiny town of Makarora--a settlement high in the mountains that bursts into view suddenly after the heart-pounding drive along the shore of the Tasman Sea and then inland cross the rugged Southern Alps, past glaciers creeping toward the ocean--a huge rainbow trout showed anglers another trick.

A remarkable trick.

Fishing a tiny creek after being blasted into a green valley by Fraser’s helicopter, an angler drifted a dry fly over the trout. He turned slowly and rose to the surface, flashing a white mouth as he neared his prey. He engulfed the small fly and was hooked.

For 10 minutes he fought stubbornly in the shallow but swift water, runs downstream sending a rush of great power up the line, down the thin fly rod and into the angler’s arm.

Another 20 feet downstream, a giant boulder protruded from the grassy bank, half of it wedged into the dry soil and half in the stream. Just below the boulder was a hole in the bank--a hollowed-out channel caused by erosion as the water pounded against the backside of the rock.

In a few seconds, the fish--roughly 25 inches long and weighing seven pounds--had doggedly made his way to the rock, the angler trailing behind as his feet hopped over, around and often into the rocks that littered the streamside.

And suddenly, the hulking shape of the fish, visible throughout the battle, had vanished. A moment later the fish reappeared, 30 feet upstream, still solidly hooked. But the angler’s line was buried in the grassy bank behind the boulder.

With the hook in his jaw and the line tugging at him horribly, the fish had blasted his way into the tunnel under the bank and emerged through another opening in the bank 20 feet upstream. With the light line chafing now against the rock and the sides of the underwater tunnel, it snapped.

The fish was free.

“Never seen anything like that,” said a wide-eyed King, the guide. “He went right for that hole. He knew it was there. Probably used it a time or two before this.”

And then he smiled.

“Smart little buggers they are, right?”

Earlier in the same day King had led two anglers around the northern shore of sparkling Lake Wanaka close to the lodge. His intent was to fish a wide and clear river that emptied into the lake, but what the anglers found as they walked the shoreline of the lake caused a slight delay.

Cruising the shoreline, sometimes no more than 10 feet from the edge, were monstrous, wild trout. Six-pounders. Seven-pounders. Eight and even nine-pound giants hugged the sandy bottom and searched for bugs and schools of tiny whitebait--New Zealand minnows--that also inhabit the lake. But as is true with all New Zealand fly fishing, what seemed to be the perfect setup of large trout feeding within casting range was a cruel joke.

The fish were there, all right. You could see them. But they could also see you.

The technique for taking such fish consisted of spotting the cruising fish far ahead against the shoreline and heading toward the angler. Then, from a kneeling position, the angler would make a quick cast with the fly landing 30 and even 40 feet ahead of the monster on the mirror surface of the lake.

And then he would wait. Heart pounding and adrenaline making the hair on his arms stand up, the angler would watch the fish cruise closer and closer to the fly, all the time fighting the urge to leap and shout in excitement.

Most times the fish would swim close to the fly, examine it lazily and then turn away. It was, even for a veteran angler like Hoyt, maddening. But a few very memorable times, the fish would be fooled and would smash at the surface, sucking in the fly and feeling the bite of the hook.

And then heading very deliberately for Australia.

Unlike battling such fish in the creeks and streams and rivers of New Zealand, where the fish’s ability to escape is sharply restricted by narrow boundaries, in a lake the fish is free to burst away in any direction, his tether only a silk-fine piece of fishing line that will break under anything but the lightest pressure.

One such rainbow, a six-pounder, took a fly and headed frantically for the center of the lake, stripping first the 30 yards of fly line and then quickly burning into the heavy Dacron backing line on the angler’s reel as the man held on with a feeling of helplessness, wishing first that he had put more backing line on the reel and then that perhaps the fish would have a heart attack before he reached the other side of the lake.

Eventually, with little line remaining on the reel, the fish slowed and stopped and then plunged into the cold Wanaka water. There he sulked, hugging the bottom and thrashing his head back and forth, neither taking nor giving an inch to the beach-bound angler.

But eventually, as it does often in the gentle hands of a skilled fly angler, the battle began to turn and the fish was coaxed toward the shore.

Soon, King slid the net under the perfectly shaped and brightly colored rainbow and heaved mightily to bring it up. A quick hook removal and a picture and then the chrome-colored fish was lowered into the water and, with a single flash of a broad tail, returned to the depths.

Fly fishing for New Zealand trout may not be the most exciting form of angling in the world. A 1,200-pound black marlin off Hawaii’s Kona coast can be a rush. Feeling the power of a 45-pound Alaskan king salmon won’t put an angler to sleep, either.

But for a combination of magnificent weather, stunning scenery and a chance to fool some of the wildest and wariest trout on earth, fish that have spent their lifetimes with very little or no contact with man, fish that eat ravenously and attain enormous proportions--fish, as Ray Grubb would tell you, of great white --New Zealand’s remote South Island is, for anglers seeking the ultimate fly fishing challenge, a hard place to top.