Thursday, March 6, after the Main Divide, I went fishing with my friend Emmanuel, who I met through the Canterbury Fly Fishing Club (Canterbury region, not uni). He is one of the most meticulous fisherman I have ever fished with, and was very good at showing the ropes to a NZ-first timer.
We fished the Boyle and Doubtful Rivers at their confluence, which is about 2 1/2 NW of Christchurch. We were in a beautiful valley, and were very lucky with the weather...even the wind stayed fairly calm. It was, however, still on of the hardest days of fishing I've ever had. We left Christchurch at 4:45am, were on the water by 9, and fished until about 8pm. We saw 25 or so fish, he caught one about 5.5 lbs, I had two on and lost both. One was definitely big, Emmanuel thought it looked like 7 lbs or so. Here's a picture of his fish:
The hardest part about the day was seeing the fish. Unlike all of the fishing I've done in the US, where I'm mostly casting into places that look fishy, here we were walking along the edge of the river (which was wide, fast, and cold) looking for fish (that he described as "smudges") in quickly moving water. The first 10 fish or so that he pointed out to me, I either couldn't see or it took me a while to make them out. Towards the end of the day, I was seeing them a lot faster, but still couldn't really find them on my own. Its definitely going to take practice to get the hang of it. Overall it was a great day though! I had a blast, and learned a ton.
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