Above The Reservoir

I woke to wind buffeting the camper. At least it would help keep the skeeters at bay, despite adding another layer of challenge to the fishing. I drank tea sitting on a bluff overlooking the river, flowing fast and turbid through a narrow canyon below.

Slowly the others stirred to life and joined me.

“I think we should go above the reservoir,” she said. “If anything, it looks murkier down here than yesterday.”

We nodded agreement. I’d fished above the reservoir once before, ten or more years ago. A return would be welcome.

“I think I’ll wet wade,” I said, preferring to tackle the trail in hiking garb rather than waders, and wanting to keep the weight in my pack to a minimum.

Dust devils swirled across the gravel as we drove higher into the mountains. We stopped to drag a fresh deadfall from the road. We slowed for several bike riders heading the opposite direction, looks of grim determination on their faces. After a half hour we gained our first glimpse of the reservoir, studded with white caps, rollers breaking against the dam wall. Snow-capped peaks framed the skyline to the west. I pulled into a turn out and grabbed my phone to take a photo and a surge in the wind caught me off balance, almost setting me on my chuff.

“If nothing else, it’ll be a pleasant walk out and back,” opined the Optimist among us. Spending a good portion of his days on a fishing boat off the Alaskan coast, he came well qualified as a judge of gales and rollers.

The road terminated and we took to the trail leading toward the snow capped peaks. Feeder streams still ran high, necessitating seeking out places to cross where deadfall provided a bridge. The first mile kept to the trees before the trail emerged into more open country where we looked down upon a meadow a half-mile across that tapered toward the mountains.

The river snaked at speed through the meadow, willow and alder growing along its banks. From our vantage point, gentle holding water for fish appeared sparse. While the others elected to fish streamers, taking the need for a dead drift out of the equation I, ever the tragic, elected to attempt to fish with a dry fly.

Despite the wind I managed multiple good drifts close to undercut banks, to no avail. The first time I set foot into the water I regretted not having waders, my lower extremities getting an instant ice-cream headache for my troubles. Standing in one place for longer than thirty seconds invited loosing feeling in one’s feet.

For several hours we leap-frogged upstream, one fish hooked but not landed the sum total of our combined efforts. We sat on a bluff and took a late lunch. Across the far side of the valley a waterfall cascaded out of a rock fissure like a giant white veil. Elsewhere, a second waterfall remained frozen in a shaded crevice high in a granite buttress. Closer to where we sat, movement in a patch of alder along the riverbank betrayed a bull moose, ambling and feeding with the insouciance of one who knows size does in fact matter. Overhead, a juvenile bald eagle battled the updrafts, wings clumsy and uncoordinated, like a teenager struggling with a growth spurt.

By now the lure of the beer cooler back at camp began to outweigh the draw of what lay further upstream. I recalled a place I’d fished earlier, where my inattention had spooked a nice fish from it’s lie.

“I’m going to give that place one more shot on the way down,” I said. “Maybe the fish has come back.”

This time I approached the lie from upstream, wading thigh-deep across a narrow channel to the head of a gravel bar with a few inches of water flowing across its surface. At the bottom end of the gravel bar two flows co-joined, and in that seam the fish had earlier sat.

As I made my first cast, landing the streamer off to one side and letting the current swing it into the lie, I realized my walking across the gravel bar had stirred up muddy sediment that drifted inexorably toward the lie. I had time for three or four more casts before any surprise would be ruined.

Two casts later the rod jumped in my hand in response to an aggressive take. Tip high, I stripped line hard, not wanting to let the fish get into the cut bank or any further downstream. Soon, I held a chunky brown in one hand and slipped the hook from its mouth, to the applause of the peanut gallery.

An hour later, back on the bluff at camp, we sat with cold beer replacing morning’s caffeine.

“Told you it was a great day for a stroll in the high country,” reminded the Optimist.

In that I could brook no argument.

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Once Upon a Time on the Mohaka

My boots settled into the soft pea-gravel of the river bed. I stood silently, thighs and calves braced against the steady press of the river, imagining the soles of my feet growing roots, tapping deeper into the earth beneath me, grounding me to this place and time. I’d last stood in the Mohaka several years ago, and with the direction life was taking, who knew how many more until I did so again?

 

With eyes closed, I inhaled the scents of the river, cool and humid – beech forest and dank vegetation overlaid with a faint hint of sulphur mingled with heather in bloom. Somewhere behind me a pair of native tui, birds whose white throat-ruff saw Europeans call them Parson’s bird, cackled noisily in the bushes along the river.

The roots grew deeper, through the soft earth and clay and volcanic substrate to the bedrock beneath. Then Steve’s voice snapped me from my reverie.

“Oi, Sunshine! Are you gonna cast to the fish, or wait till it stops feeding?”

I returned my attention to the task at hand. Thirty yards upstream, a small rocky point jutted out into the flow as the river made a sweeping curve to my left. The point created a large back eddy, at the bottom of which I stood. A current seam swirled off the tip of the point, and in this seam a brown trout fed freely, rising every thirty seconds or so to take small mayflies from the surface. Steve, a friend who guides anglers and hunters in this part of New Zealand, had concealed himself in the bushes along the bank above where the fish fed, acting as my spotter.

“OK, false cast directly upstream in front of you. When you’ve got enough line out, I’ll let you know. Then drop the fly in front of the fish.”

I stripped line off the reel then began false casting, once letting the line land on the water ahead of me, well away from the fish.

“Quit fishing like an **#!%$ American!” he yelled, stifling a curse under his breath. “Keep the line off the water!”

He was right. Any hint that there was an intruder present would see the fish disappear into the river’s depths. Suitably chastised, I continued to false cast until he gave the word, and I set the fly on the water, directly on the current seam. It was a small fly, riding low on water reflecting the glare of the surrounding bush.

My first cast was short. A rise, well away from my drift. Second cast, this time in the zone. Another rise. I waited a second then struck hard. The fish, hooked, immediately charged for the faster current in the center of the river while I endeavored to raise the rod tip high, to get some leverage against its pull. Still underwater, it turned upstream then leapt clear of the river, slapping down on its flank as it shook from side to side. The line went slack. Up in the bushes, Steve groaned, head in hands.

“Mate, that was a spanking! Welcome home.”

I shook my head as I reeled in my line. The hook was bent out, straightened to a right angle.

“Well, so much for that.” I gently eased first one, then the other, boot from the pea-gravel and turned toward the shore. The tui still cackled, and in response to the gathering heat of the day cicadas had started to rasp, their collective crescendo rising and falling, an aural manifestation of the river’s pulse, of the life force that flows through and around us.

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The Rainbow, the Grasshopper and the Moose

Brian scratched his chin. “Well, we’ve got a couple of options. We could go down river, float below town. There’s probably some big browns moving up from the Yellowstone. Or, we could go up above the bridge. There’s a ranch up there, supposedly owned by Nationally Famous Person. If he’s there, he won’t be happy. I know a couple of guys who did it once. Had some guys waving shotguns, yelling at them.”

The Rainbow, the Grasshopper, and the Moose from Hayden Mellsop on Vimeo.

Cave and I looked at each other. On the one hand, confrontation defeats the purpose. On the other, the rich and famous should never be allowed to intimidate the proletariat from pursuing their state sanctioned pleasures. We nodded. “Let’s go up river.”

“OK,” said Brian, “but I gotta warn you. The take out is a bitch. We’ll have to dismantle and drag our stuff up a cliff then haul it out on a game cart.”

The road upriver turned from blacktop to gravel, the meadows through which it ran festooned with barbed wire and No Trespassing signs. We turned down a narrow two track, the only side road without a gate across it, and bounced slowly down to the river. We slid the boat off the trailer into beautiful water, gin clear, its banks festooned with foliage in the throes of fall.

The fish lay invisible against the cobbles, or where they held in deeper water, it was the shadows they cast on the river bed that gave away their position, rather than the fish themselves. Long casts were the order of the day, and it felt right that, so late in October, we dressed in shirt sleeves and the rainbows rose to hoppers.

I was pleased to see that there was no sign of Nationally Famous Person attempting to impose his ego on the river itself – no feeders, no artificial structure designed to corral the fish, no oversized couch potatoes conditioned to rise mindlessly to anything landing on the surface, just wild fish in their element. And best of all, no shotguns, or cuss words, save those we served up ourselves during the normal course of a day spent angling.

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The Rainbow, the Grasshopper and the Moose

Brian scratched his chin. “Well, we’ve got a couple of options. We could go down river, float below town. There’s probably some big browns moving up from the Yellowstone. Or, we could go up above the bridge. There’s a ranch up there, supposedly owned by Nationally Famous Person. If he’s there, he won’t be happy. I know a couple of guys who did it once. Had some guys waving shotguns, yelling at them.”

The Rainbow, the Grasshopper, and the Moose from Hayden Mellsop on Vimeo.

Cave and I looked at each other. On the one hand, confrontation defeats the purpose. On the other, the rich and famous should never be allowed to intimidate the proletariat from pursuing their state sanctioned pleasures. We nodded. “Let’s go up river.”

“OK,” said Brian, “but I gotta warn you. The take out is a bitch. We’ll have to dismantle and drag our stuff up a cliff then haul it out on a game cart.”

The road upriver turned from blacktop to gravel, the meadows through which it ran festooned with barbed wire and No Trespassing signs. We turned down a narrow two track, the only side road without a gate across it, and bounced slowly down to the river. We slid the boat off the trailer into beautiful water, gin clear, its banks festooned with foliage in the throes of fall.

The fish lay invisible against the cobbles, or where they held in deeper water, it was the shadows they cast on the river bed that gave away their position, rather than the fish themselves. Long casts were the order of the day, and it felt right that, so late in October, we dressed in shirt sleeves and the rainbows rose to hoppers.

I was pleased to see that there was no sign of Nationally Famous Person attempting to impose his ego on the river itself – no feeders, no artificial structure designed to corral the fish, no oversized couch potatoes conditioned to rise mindlessly to anything landing on the surface, just wild fish in their element. And best of all, no shotguns, or cuss words, save those we served up ourselves during the normal course of a day spent angling.

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What Happened to Summer?

It comes as a shock to realize that in a few short weeks, the mountainsides will be speckled with orange and gold. A subtle shift will have taken place in the tilt of the earth and in the tint of blue in the sky, and we will suddenly realize that summer, once again, has snuck by while we were busy making plans about how to spend it.

What Happened to Summer from Hayden Mellsop on Vimeo.

To date it has been a great summer for the river and those who make their living from it, be they rafters, ranchers or fishing guides. For the latter, the season has not been without its challenges, particularly playing dodge ball with the pockets of discoloration that are the by-product of the frequent, intense rainfall we’ve been experiencing. Fortunately, with a hundred miles of river and multiple launch and take out options available, finding water sufficiently clear to fish has been relatively easy.

My take on murky water has always been that if you can see the rocks below the surface along the edges, then the fish too can see your fly if you place it there. A bit of murk means the luxury of fishing with heavier tippet, and being able to get away with less- than-textbook presentation. And the higher flows, while a challenge for shore based anglers, have been a blessing for those of us on the oars, with few rocks to dodge and lots of shore bank to fish to.

So even though summer seems to be rapidly vanishing over the horizon toward fall, there is still plenty of time, and good reason, to get out on the river and enjoy while the fun lasts.

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