The Rio Santa Cruz

is over 380kms long from its source in the huge glacier fed Lagos Argentinos to the Atlantic Ocean at Santa Cruz.

The Santa Cruz is a big river and may be compared in volume to the Skeena or even Columbia River.

The water carries a glacial tinge from source to sea and during periods of high temperature can be quite milky in appearance. The overall impression is of a grand and powerful waterway moving blue and inexorable through the sere brown Patagonian landscape of Estancia and semi-desert.

Unique

The unique and special thing about Santa Cruz is the fact that between 1906-1909 steelhead rainbow trout from California’s McCloud river (Now barred by the Shasta Dam) were transplanted and forgotten about by unknown and unsung pioneers. The result of this selfless activity is nothing short of a modern phenomenon, a huge and self-sustaining run of Atlantic steelhead trout in a waterway lightly touched by the hand of man.

Fortunately Argentinean fishery scientists on the Santa Cruz have conducted extensive scientific work and as a result of this work we have knowledge of how fish use and distribute themselves throughout the river.

Until recently this work has never been evaluated within an angling context and therefore what fishing that has been done has been concentrated in the extensive estuary zone and the river itself written off as too large an area to get to grips with.

Loop Adventures regarded this as a significant oversight and over the last 2 years set out to deliberately test fish and explore the river from source to sea.We knew from radio tracking and test netting that contrary to the belief of many the huge population of steelhead actually spawned and lived in the main river and did not make extensive use of tributary systems. We also learned that the fish began to run in earnest during the Argentinean Fall in March and April and that the bulk of the migratory stock was in the river during this period.

Exploration

Our explorations have involved floating the river and also evaluating a possible base in the middle river in conjunction with extensive test fishing. Our experimentation conducted by highly experienced BC steelhead pros has left us in no doubt that this river has great potential.

Throughout the huge length of our test area (over 150kms) we found chrome bright steelhead between 6-20lbs ready to strike hard with all traditional fly fishing methods, including surface fly which we found remarkable given the cloudy nature of the water. Our best afternoon was 17 steelhead hook ups and 9 landed between 3 rods, all the fish were tide bright between 9-16lbs and we were over 100km from the sea fishing a sweeping bend chosen at random.