Greg lives in San Francisco with his partner from NZ. He comes over every year and had recently joined a local fly fishing club back home. He hired a guide in Taranaki and caught some nice fish nymphing. That was his first real go at fly fishing. He came to Whakatane and found me. His goal was to catch a trout on a dry fly. We headed down the river for a day. He started with a spinner which was still very new to him. It was not long before he caught what I consider to be a trophy rainbow for the Rangitaiki River. It was a brilliant start.
The next thing I did was put a fly rod in his hands with a big cicada on a 10 pound fluoro tippet. We went through the basics of how and where to slap it in and we floated along. It took a lot of casts before he finally hooked one once he figured out to count to three before striking. There were many precocious strikes before that.
We stopped and did some nymphing. Greg picked up another half dozen or so rainbows on variety of caddis nymphs. The day before with Blair we killed a few trout for the smoker. They were all full of caddis nymphs. The weighted fly was the tungsten pink tag nymph but it did not hook a fish. It is simply a hare and copper nymph with a pink tail.
We carried on casting big cicada flies to the edge as we floated along. More fish were caught. We stopped at a foaming eddy where Greg hooked and lost several fish then caught one on a chubby Chernoble dry fly. He was having trouble seeing his fly so I put on the biggest, most visible fly I had. I showed him a trick where he could fish a dry downstream then dapple it back up and let it drift down again. He did it perfectly and it worked a treat!
We tried some stalking with an elk hair caddis but wound up spooking everything. I had to give him a challenge that would humble him so he understood it is not easy stalking trout. We had a dry spell for a while although he was doing everything right with his big cicada. After a lot of casts I saw a gentle rise and called it. He dropped the cicada in perfectly, it gently sipped, we both counted to three then boom, another nice brown. We picked up one more brown right at the end of our day, which was most satisfying for both of us.
What a great day. It was so satisfying helping a novice catch so many trout. I am sure he will be back next year.
