Zander Kennies who was one of two who never had been here before, since he normally goes for brown trout in the UK and New Zealand. His former record of sea trout was 2½lbs, and after a days adapting to the river, wind and not at least a double handed rod, he broke his old record with no more than 600%, we suggested him that he, in the future, should keep some of the small ones for bait.
Otherwise everyone else had been here before, except from Mark Whitehead, who wasn’t unfamiliar with Argentina though, since he had fished the Falklands earlier. So it was quite easy for everyone to fall into the daily schedule, and technique of fishing.
The river was dropping slowly from the rise last week and stabilized around +15cm on the water gauge until Thursday when it started to drop a bit faster and ended just below 0. Still coloured like dark tea the water is more or less what you could wish for. The temperatures are changing every morning depending on the previous night. During this week, we saw water-temperatures down to 5C in the morning, which of course slows the fishing down, but when the nights had been mild, the fishing was great right after breakfast. Wind picked up during the week, so Thursday and Friday was quite tough, and with the high water level, the river gets muddy when the waves stirs up the riverbed.
We still have fresh fish running the river, so our catch was mainly fresh-run fish, but this time of year you will catch some coloured ones, since the run starts as early as October. Now we also starts to see the fish we’ve been missing since February those around 4-6 lbs.
Tony Evans and Gareth Rees who, even though they fished here earlier, started catching fish later than everyone else, just like they were always the last ones up in the morning or after the siesta….
Nicko Mills decided not to follow the guides advice about where to fish, and fished in between the known pools, and didn’t do that bad, but maybe he would have caught more if he had done like his wife Sue; “listening to your guide” ‘cause Sue did very well during the week.
The Yartu’s (Pedro and Jamie) shared the beat, but didn’t share the fish, or maybe we should say, one day Jamie caught all the fish the next it was Pedro’s so a bit unevenly shared.
All in all a good week, and especially very good company.
No. of rods: 10
Top-rod: Sue Mills (11)
Biggest fish: Gareth Rees (18 lbs)
Avg. weight: 7,9 lbs
Top Fly: Bitch Creek
