I convinced Dan to take the afternoon off to go fish Lake Aniwhenua before they filled it back up. We got there with at least 30 km of southerly wind. It was literally too dangerous to put the canoe in the water. So we had a look by the dam and saw dozens of fish trying to jump back up through the white water coming out of the base of the dam. Suddenly, they turned the water off and closed the dam. We rigged up our rods and went fishing. By the time I set up my nymphing rig, Dan was landing the first rainbow on a bead head krystal olive woolly bugger. I nymphed using a green epoxy bomb size 12 with a bunch of different nymphs and globugs. They all worked. Dan used his floating line and cast buggers and streamers. Everything worked. Dan did try a parachute cricket dry fly and had no success even though fish were rising. We were literally watching schools of 50 trout swimming by and chasing our flies. It was silly.
The rest of the flies we used were: orange globug with a red dot, chartreuse globug with a red dot, egg sack pink globug, bead head bloodworm nymph, blood worm nymph, bead head prince nymph, prince nymph, black stonefly nymph, San Wan worm, green caddis soft hackle wee wet, bead head krystal white woolly bugger and a bead head olive and black woolly bugger, I am pretty sure there were others. Once a fish is landed I put the fly in a separate container so I can document later. Some get caught in the net and others do not make it into the container.
So these trout got washed over the dam. They only know to try and swim back up. There is no way back up. So these trout will swim around and loose condition. There is not enough food available there for hundreds to thousands of trapped trout. Go there now and catch some and kill your two trout limit. If you are kind, you will transport any fish you do not kill back above the dam. They will either die or perhaps get washed down river in the next flood event. I have seen it all before.
We got a little bored after a few hours, grabbed a beer and went home. We took four good trout with us that I filleted, boneless for Dan to make some more red Thai curry fish cakes.
