It was just another day dry fly fishing for brown and rainbow trout in paradise.
A few days ago Blair suggested we go for a fish. The next morning we were on the Rangitaiki around nine in the morning. I started Blair with a deer hair cicada with an elk hair caddis trailing. The river was running swift and there was a lot of thick green algae in the water column. Being controlled by hydro dams at both ends, conditions change all the time depending on the need for power. In this case water level had risen then dropped, taking shoreline algae away with it. It was definitely not ideal to put a nymph below the dry fly.
I said to myself that I will just let Blair do his thing and not correct him much. After all I had recently taught Kadin and then Jack how to cast a dry fly and both children worked it out pretty quickly.
It was just about a year ago when Blair caught his first trout on a dry fly. He clearly had not tried since because he was terrible! He caught tree after tree and completely forgot anything I had ever taught him. After losing several combos, I tied on a single elk hair caddis in a size 14. I had to intervene and talk him through casting again. Ten to two is the most basic thing in fly fishing. He started to get it. Then he learned how to mend when fishing upstream. Then I introduced the roll cast to both present a fly and to prepare your line for an overhead cast.
We had at least half a dozen large rainbows feeding in a foam line in swift but unbroken water. It took a little while but he got everything right and caught a great rainbow. The next one missed the elk hair caddis and would not take it again. On went a Goddard Caddis dry fly size 14 and Blair was into his next good rainbow.
Then Blair gave me a turn with his rod. The Goddard caddis fell apart after two more rainbows. The elk hair caddis went back on and again missed a fish and it would not look again. So on goes a passion vine hopper and boom! another rainbow in the net. We stayed for a few hours in the area and landed many rainbows. That stretch features in the short video below.
We floated along mostly using a size 10 elk hair caddis as we floated along. The sight fishing was excellent and Blair continued to have success and so did I. The second GoPro battery was dead so we missed out on the best part of the day.
There were two spring creeks we fished. The first Blair got a great brown then I got three hard fighting rainbows in a row, all with the same size 10 elk hair caddis.
The second spring creek is a famous location and notoriously challenging. Blair saw the brown and handed me his rod as it was in the too-hard-basket for him. I cast the size 16 elk hair caddis and hooked him on his third attempt to eat it. He was lying where my right hand is in the photo.
Then we walked up the creek and Blair presented a perfect, long cast and caught another beauty brown on the same fly. It was pretty much the ultimate challenge in sight fishing. We had no camera or net but Blair thought it was much bigger than mine. I went to release it but Blair wanted to eat it so he almost fell in scooping the brown onto the grassy bank. Before he got up, I had tossed the beauty brown back in and watched it shoot away under the weeds. It was a little funny to see the look on Blair's face.
