Fishing Report 23/02/2011

Sorry I didn't get to doing a report last week, things got very busy with the guiding.  Well things are surely starting to improve again on the Tongariro River with some nice fresh rainbow trout landed over the week.  Most were landed on cicadas with a black beaded nymph underneath.  There are still allot of big brown trout in the river and I have been hearing all week that they are very hard to hook.  This is usually the case with these fish during the day although in the evening they seem to feed allot more actively and the best way to target these fish is to use a sink tip line and dark olive or black wooly buggers swung right infront of there nose.

I guided Peter and his son Walker on Sunday.  They landed 2 nice rainbows and a large brown was hooked but not landed, this brown was sitting deep in a pool and would not respond to dry flies or small nymphs sunk deep into the pool, after about 15 minutes of trying everything in my fly box with no luck i decided to try something a little bit different.  I tied on a # 8 olive deer hair cicada and trimmed away all the spikey deer hair bits so all we were left with was the cicada shaped body the wings and the eyes I then put one AAA split shot about 15 cm above the fly, then casted it well up stream of the fish and watched it slowley sink deep towards the fish.  Well this fish didn't hesitate to race over and grab the fly.  So as you see with these big brown trout it pays to think outside the square a bit.  So this week I am going to work on a sinking cicada fly for those dificult brownies.

Tight Lines

Cheers Marcel