As mentioned last week, you just cannot control the weather, and this week offered everything you could think of. A bit like like all four seasons in a week. It started out cold and windy with a couple of days with snow/hail showers, then changed into hot summer days, with very cold nights (way below 0C) finally ending with an upstream wind and greyish cloud cover.
Because of the strange weather, the water temperature changed from 3C in the morning to 10-12 in the evening. Unusually calm wind conditions made the river look like a mirror, not easy conditions for seatrout fishing, but this week’s guests were nearly all “old-timers” on the river, so they knew how to handle these conditions.
Due to the rapid changing conditions, a change of technique was necessary, changing from big heavy black tubes to smaller regular rubberlegs flies. Similar situation with the pools, there were no significant well producing pools, soon it was the faster water for later to be the deep slow running ones that produced the fish, so a well spread pattern which created the need of fishing as many pools as possible.
The river dropped from 25 cm above 0 to +10 cm with a couple of small rises in between, the colour of the water was all week dark to light tea-colour, so all in all acceptable conditions except from the fast changes of water temperature.
The average size of the fish was again very high, and especially Lars Blom who fished here earlier remembered his biggest fish from his last trip was just above 9lbs, and this week he hardly caught any below.
It seems like we again have fish holding in the pools. Whether it’s fish dropping back from the upper part of the river we don’t know, but the catch this week was a mix of older fish and new running “bars of silver”, so hopefully more fish is stacking up in our pools.
Thursday and Friday definitely showed quite a few new fish, and a good number caught.The week also offered some horseback riding, and maybe Leif and Tony soon applies for a job as a gaucho on the Estancia.
Also, since the weather was nice we had outside “assado” (barbeque) with empanadas, lamb and steaks. Dining outside in the sun was a really nice change from the first couple of “snowy” days.
A new sport was invented for the siesta: “cat-fishing” our house kittens willingly attacked a cigarette-filter tied to the leader, but precision and the right stripping technique was needed.
No. of rods: 9
Top-rod: Illthyd Griffiths (13)
Biggest fish: Leif Areskog (17½lbs)
Avg. weight: 8,5 lbs
Top Flies: Black tubes and Yuk Bug
