Just Another Day In Patagonia

Lo and behold ~ it wasn’t the end of my Austral season after all! After more than three weeks of no fishing, Emiliano Luro and I loaded the truck up with boat, gear and camping supplies in a fit of piscatory mania that would probably make heroin withdrawals look like a day at the beach. And off we went. went,… and went,… and went,… all the way to the Rio Limay.

This river forms the border between Neuquen and Rio Negro provinces to the north of Bariloche, and is open to fishing through the end of May. The drive, needless to say, was long. In fact we left about two hours before dawn and still weren’t putting in on the river until almost three in the afternoon.

The Limay is a weird, tortured thing, smallish and unobtrusive as it leaves Lago Nahuel Huapi up by Bariloche and begins its long and winding journey to the Atlantic. It is pretty immediately into the pampas at that point, with the usual sauces and red-rock cliffs along its banks the whole way, and a lot of twists and bends, encountering the first hydro-electric dam just after its confluence with the Rio Caleufu from the North and Arroyo Pichi Leufu from the south. This begins a series of dams and flood control gates that form several distinct reservoirs and tailwaters all the way to the city of Neuquen.

The section we floated is known as the middle Limay, below the first two dams and between the tiny town of Piedra del Aquila and Picun Leufu. The river is somewhat bleak here in its appearance above the waterline, but utterly fascinating below the surface. At times all at once unbelievably deep and wide, and at other times dividing into a maze of interconnected channels and islands with shallow riffles all around, the only thing that is consistent is the clarity of the water and the cleanliness of the seemingly manicured pebbly bottom.

Although there are certainly plenty of resident rainbows swimming about and eating mayflies the attraction, for most anglers anyway, is the influx of migratory browns from the reservoirs that the river connects. And Emiliano and I got our first taste of these only thirty minutes into our float.

What fish! Big, strong, angry, hook-jawed male brown trout are in no mood to play when autumn’s orange light hits the river, and they attack most anything smaller than they are that comes near them as they make their way upstream from the lakes. We caught fish on a variety of large streamers using sink tips and intermediate sinking lines, but I must say that the Green Giant accounted for more than its fair share of the hook-ups.

Our float was three days in total with two nights camped on the river’s islands, and although the temperatures were less than balmy we enjoyed excellent weather throughout, with light winds and no precipitation. Overall I’d have to say that this last week of the season float has all the makings of a yearly event that will likely become the closer of my Patagonian fishing year for many years to come.

Well folks, the fishing season has officially come to a close here in Argentine Patagonia; time for another six months of waiting, tromping around exploring without the rod, and tying flies. Well, and fishing, up in that “other” hemisphere (I am due on Cape Cod for a striper trip in a just few weeks).

These last few days have been a real treat though, with excellent weather and good folks and plenty of trout to go around. I spent several days out at the Boca with Paulino Arias and his gang, living in “camp” under the bridge and swinging big streamers in front of huge rainbows every day at dawn and then again at dusk. During the days between I drove off to one spot or another on one of the small streams to cast dries at angry browns or brookies, all jacked up on hormones and ready for the spawn.

Then in the end I got an itch to explore new water so I drove all the way up to the Nantes y Falls, a stream that drains Lago Rosario just south of Trevelin, and spent the very last day of the season casting size #22 emergers on 7x tippet to twenty-plus inch rainbows, most of whom knew the difference between my offerings and the hatch of tiny insects they were actively ravaging.

This is a far cry from the type of fishing I am used to down around Rio Pico, and I had to dig deep into the tackle bag to find that tippet, but it was a really fun change of pace for sure. There were a few of the big rainbows too, a very few, but some nonetheless, who apparently must not have attended the most recent meetings of their local Mensa chapter, and so we were allowed to meet.

Overall it was a fine day, with beautiful fall light and yellow leaves and plenty of rising fish. Not much more you could ask for I’d say. I look forward to seeing you all soon.

Hey Folks! Well, the weather has turned back to decent, if slightly strange in the sense that we have had several days of unheard of west-bound winds, and the fishing has been just great.

John Sibley and Colin McCrossin accompanied me to Lago 1 for some excellent action with the resident brown trout population, and then Ana and John and I headed to Lago Vintter to try our hands at catching some of the big healthy rainbows out along the Chilean border.

Those trips combined with a couple of very successful nights with the brook trout at the Corcovado boca have made for some really excellent fishing over the last week, and I am excited still about the weeks to come between now and the end of the season.
In other news Ana has been having a good bit of success with mushroom hunting here of late, making excellent escabeche with her finds, and on top of that has taken up with a milk-producing cow just outside of town and begun to make home-made cheese! Yes, you heard me right. She milks the cow, then she makes cheese out of the milk. Then I eat the cheese. It’s a good system.
The cheese needs not stand alone however; believe it or not, I have been using my free time to practice the ancient art of making bread. This is actually a lot more interesting and fun than I ever would have previously imagined, and it occurs to me that the possibilities for recipe tweaking and artisanal modification are nearly endless. There is something just wholesomely satisfying about watching a loaf of bread rise and turn brown across the top, and after all these years of eating store-bought junk bread I am amazed at how easy making my own

The Long Walk

I guess I won’t try to compare it with The Long Walk from Northern Siberia down to India, but I will say this: the Rio Corcovado passes through a lot of country on its way from Lago Vinttner to the Chilean border. Unable over the last several years to find anyone in Esquel, Rio Pico, or the town of Corcovado who could describe for me the whole path of the river’s course, I decided this year to just walk it and see for myself what was out there.
Now, having done so, I can say with some certainty that my questions were mostly unanswerable anyway, at least within the space of a short conversation or, as it may be, a blog entry posted online. The river is long. It winds its way through Estancia Tecka and down into the canyon above Estancia Poncho Moro putting on a thousand different faces along the way. At times it is almost unrecognizable in comparison with the easily known brook trout structure just below the boca or the long stretch of king salmon and browns between town and the frontera. It is, I can now say, easily the most diversely structured river I have ever known anywhere in the world; and it is immensely impressive and beautiful for being so.
It rained on me almost the entire trip, and between the water in my waders and the sometimes more than twenty miles a day that I walked my feet became blistered and sore to an alarming degree. I did not do as much fishing as I would have liked, but I took a lot of photographs and marked a lot of interesting waypoints with the GPS. I saw no one the entire time. It was a long walk, wet, and cold, and tiring, but I am glad I did it (an easy thing to say from the comfort of my recliner in the kitchen in Rio Pico). Now I just have to get my feet healed up so I can get back out and do some fishing.

Well I guess all good things come to an end, but in Sal’s case, they tend to come to a good end, and on this trip, a very good end indeed! We started out our last week out on Lago 1, putting in at Cabanas La Bahia and catching decent browns all day, taking turns rowing against the wind. Then it was off on another exploratory mission to a couple of the tributary creeks that cross Estancia Poncho Moro and flow into the Corcovado below the canyon.

The first one we hit, Arroyo Pedregoso, was what you would call a no-go, in the sense that it turned out to be absolutely nothing like what we thought it would be in consistency or trajectory, and pretty much resulted in a slog that was only worth doing so that we could know better than to repeat it in the future. The next one we did was a stream that is well known to me though, and produced very nice brown trout which rose to our “Extra-Terrestrials” like they were candy. We fished some of the brookie run on the way back across that evening as well, all of us catching fish in the last hour of light, some of them quite large.

(For those of us who are originally Appalachian types from North America, brook trout over 12” in length are something we will never quite get used to; and as such, brook trout that weigh three to five pounds can continue to amaze us night after night and we never quite get tired of it.) We stopped by my good friend Paulino Arias’ house the next day so the boys could pick up some flies, then headed back out to Lago Uno for one last go at the browns on the far side of the lake. These did not disappoint, and we each got several in between turns at the oars, most of the fish being caught on streamers fished none too deep as we had sufficient cloud cover to bring the fish up to the surface and sufficient breeze to conceal our presence. And then it was on to the grand finale. Sal’s last day of fishing in Patagonia for the year turned out to be his best – ever. We put in at Lago 3 on the public beach at around 11 this morning and Sal caught the first fish of the day on a fly he had tied himself a few days before. It was a smallish rainbow, by Lago 3 standards, but significant still as the first fish he had ever in fact caught on a fly he had invented himself. On the very next cast a huge brown came up for it right at the side of the boat, ate it, and left with it, breaking Sal’s tippet like it wasn’t even there. This event started a pattern that was to last the rest of the afternoon.

Sal tied on a small black rabbit strip fly that he had purchased in Esquel on our last visit there, and he proceeded to hook and lose fish on it with such frequency that the whole thing became truly laughable. After several hours of this though he wasn’t laughing any more, and by the time we had worked our way all the way up and back down the juncos on the far side of the lake it had happened literally more than two dozen times. In the meantime I had caught a couple of nice fish on a Black Giant, but Zach was skunked. I was rowing, and when we got back down to the bend where I caught my very first rainbow from Lago Tres back in 08’ I dropped anchor (deciding it was time to drink another beer in an effort to change our luck). Just then Sal finally hooked one good. He didn’t have faith though, and a few seconds into the fight he thought he had lost it, dropped his rod and truly screamed in frustration. Zach and I were not fooled however, and as I desperately hauled anchor we begged him to tighten the line. The fish was still on. This fish ran Sal all the way into his backing on the next run, then jumped, and had us all shut up after that as I rowed out away from the weeds and watched the fish do more than fifteen minutes worth of very good tricks trying to rid himself of Sal’s fly. Two runs all the way into the backing were recorded, and to be honest

I think the anxiety was pretty high boat-wide as the fish went around and around us and ran again and again refusing to come to the net. I did my best to turn the boat according to the wild movements of the line, then finally manned the net and as I lifted it was heavy. Really, really heavy in fact, for it contained a fat female rainbow trout of better than thirty inches length. We were mostly speechless as Sal extracted her from the net and posed for a couple of pictures. Once we had them I put her over the side and Zach continued to photograph her under water as I revived her, which took a long time after the battle she had put us through, but in the end she swam off strongly into the deep. The anchor was re-dropped, the beer at long last opened, and a toast enthusiastically made, for the last fish of the trip for Salvatore Anthony Bruno, was a monster of a monster indeed.

March 16, 2010

Hi everyone; it has been yet another great week down here in Patagonia. We finally abandoned the campsite out at Nikita’s and headed back in to Rio Pico, but not before catching some really nice brookies out of the holes down at Llao llao and beyond on the evening bite. We did one day in a pretty strong wind over on Lago 4, putting in at Los Cerezos, and caught lots of decent rainbows and a few of the largest brown trout I have ever seen come out of that lake.

It was a one-fly day though, with the Black Giant accounting for every single fish caught on all three rods, which is not to say that Zach didn’t try his best to make something else work. It just wouldn’t. Next we headed out to the town of Corcovado soon after to run the lower river in the boat. This was a heck of a trip, super enjoyable in the sense that it was a beautiful day and we caught plenty of really nice brown trout, and maddening in the sense that it seemed as though we were

constantly surrounded by leaping throngs of huge Pacific salmon that could not be made angry enough to attack our flies. The river has come down quite a bit since our running of it earlier in the year, and as a result many of the rapids have to be approached in a whole new way to avoid newly exposed rocks, but overall I would say that

it fishes easier this way, and that it still isn’t really too bad for the oarsman.

Zach paid me back for all the trips I rowed for him earlier in the year though, spending better than three quarters of the day behind the oars, as I just sat back in the stern and put flies under the branches of the sauces all the way down.

Then it was back to Llao llao and the big bend pool on the way back that evening, and incredibly all three of us got into the brookies just at sunset like they were on fire for our skinny black flies. In between all of this we somehow found time for the big Asado in town at the festival del pueblo Rio Pico, a trip to Esquel for leader material and hard to find groceries, and to run a shuttle for a walk Zach did on the Rio Tecka out by the Ruta 40. Here’s looking forward to next week’s work; it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it!

Hey Folks! Sorry for the long-time-no-update; Sal Bruno made it down from Delaware last week and we’ve been fishing pretty hard ever since. His first day in we fished the Nilson from its confluence with the Rio Pico back up to the other side of Tres Leones out off the road from Lago Tres. Mostly it was a dry fly affair, with rainbows up to about twenty inches and a few browns that went twenty four eating stimulators and hoppers all the way up.

Zach came back in from Esquel while we were out there though, and we all decided that Lago 5 was a good bet that next morning. We ended up putting in on a sheet of glass with bright sun and no wind whatsoever, which made the fishing hard. The good ones tend to stay deep in this lake under those conditions, and it is difficult to get a fly down to them without spooking them with the oars. Sal got a nice brown on a yellow giant though and Zach got a nice one on his dorado fly. I – well, I still got skunked.

It is what it is. I did get to go swimming though. The next day we headed over to Pube’s with bright sun but a little bit more wind, and caught quite a few decent fish including the monster brown pictured here which Sal pulled out of one of the spring creeks. Then it was over to Lago 3, which also gave up several very nice fish to the ever reliable Green Giants we threw. Two weeks left to go on this trip and we’ll be fishing almost every day; stay tuned!

I finally got around to making that long walk down "Nameless" Creek today, all the way to where it hits the Rio Corcovado. Man – what a trek! I woke up at four, was out of the house by five, and hiking downstream from the bridge by six thirty. The stream more than triples in size on its way down through the estancia, fed by several tributaries, some of which are quite large. It is beautiful country though, and although I saw sign of horses and men having passed recently, I encountered nothing living except for cows and a large covey of quail. After about an hour I passed a falls that I was pretty sure was the stopper of any species from the Corcovado that might decide to climb, and within another hour I was descending to the river itself, surprised to find that I was then so close to Estancia Poncho Moro, which I could clearly see from the last ridge. Having arrived at the river I sat down and took a maté, then started back upstream along the creek. The creek looked great down there, and I more or less immediately caught a nice eighteen inch brown trout on a stimulator, then continued to get similar fish all the way up to the big canyon which I had skirted the rim of on the way down. At the canyon I switched from dry flies to a large green and black wooly bugger, determined to dredge the depths in hope of larger fish, and was not disappointed. Several of the deep holes in the canyon yielded as many as two or three amazingly colored resident browns that were better than twenty inches, and I lost a few that I think were better than those I caught. At the falls, which do not fall into the category of those which disappointingly make their landing in gravel without yielding a plunge-pool, I found conditions to be better than I ever could have hoped. In fact an immense pool was carved at the waterfall’s base, god only knows how deep, and though I only hooked (then lost) one fish there, it was as big and as surprising as I could have hoped for. After climbing out of the canyon at past five o’clock I realized that I had better start making tracks for home, but changed back to a hopper anyway in order to test my brown-stoppage theory about the falls. Sure enough, rainbows only, some of them going nineteen or twenty inches, rose and ate the fly from just about every lie they could reasonably be expected to inhabit until finally at seven I had to peel myself from the stream, break down the rod, and get serious about the hike back out to the truck. It’s beautiful country to be sure.

It was a lot of miles (or rather, kilometers) beneath the wheels, but they were worth it; we saw incredible country and enjoyed awesome company and food all along the route. The weather was a bit off throughout the Chilean portion of the trip, with rain at some point or another almost every day, but that made for some spectacular waterfall viewing so in the end it was a mix of blessing and curse. Trout were caught, sights were seen, elusive Huemul deer stalked and photographed, birds identified, vestiges of ancient indigenous cultures analyzed and photographed, food, wine, and local beers savored, and by all accounts a good time enjoyed throughout the trip.

Ran the Corcovado River twice this last week looking for big brown trout and maybe a stray salmon or two amongst the rapids; water levels are still very high and the ride is pretty wild. The first trip saw Zach Otte in the bow, a fellow who works the Corcovado as a rafting guide for EPA, a local tourism company. He threw big streamers at and under the sauses all the way down, landing seven decent browns and getting broken off by two monsters. Zach is a very efficient fly fisherman who puts his fly in the right water almost all the time with very minimal false-casting, and was a pleasure to row for. The second trip was with Colin McCrossin, a salmon guide from Alaska who spends at least six months of every year fly fishing in Patagonia.

Colin tried casting smaller streamers on a floating line with little success in the high water, but made up for it when he switched to a small black foam beetle and hooked four nice risers in row. Ana took the stern seat on both trips and had a good time hanging on through the drops.

There is little more that a fly fisherman can ask for in life than to explore new water and find big fish, especially where they are least expected. Today we managed to do just that, putting the float tubes in on a high mountain lake here in Chubut Province (no – I won’t be naming it) which several local guides had assured us held absolutely no fish at all. As it turns out though, they were wrong, proving once again that no matter how many dead end roads you follow, no matter how many streams you wade, no matter how many lakes and rivers you float, here in Patagonia there is always something new to discover just around the bend. I will be honest in saying that
I have no real idea how much the monster pictured here actually weighed. I had him in my lap only long enough for a couple of quick snapshots before he was sent swimming back into the depths with a cross look on his oversized face; but I will say, he was big. Big. Old. Trout. No two ways about it. (That’s a nine weight large arbor reel next to his head….)

Drove out past Lago 3 to fish the spring creeks running into the Rio Pico on Estancia Tres Leones today, but in the end I never wet a line. The owner of the estancia and his son Leon were just gearing up to do the castrating, earmarking, and tail docking of the year’s crop of lambs (corderos), and as it turned out, they were exactly one man short.

Jonah Complex anyone? So for the next seven hours I wrestled lambs with Leon, snatching them out of the corral and lifting each one onto a blood covered table for Pube to go to work on with the knife. The females were the lucky ones in my opinion, as they only had to have their ears cut and their tails docked, whereas the males had to suffer the embarrassing application of a tight rubber band to their scrotums, effectively cutting off all circulation to their testicles, which I am told will then dry up and fall off within a few weeks. It is fascinating to watch (and participate in) this work.
The knife was given a few strokes on the wet stone after almost every lamb and it continued to amaze me that Pube never cut himself at all while working on the writhing creatures Leon and I struggled to keep pinned to the bloody boards.

It is, I will say, hard work on both sides of the table. Leon’s brother (the missing third man) showed up at the end to help with the last few lambs, but by then we had already done over three hundred of them and I was far too tired to fish. I took the road back out to town, stopping briefly at Cabanas Toldos to startle Mario Garcia and his family who at first glance seeing all the blood on my clothing thought I had surely been involved in some terrible accident. I explained that I had started out to go fishing, but - Welcome to being a local.

Blessed with my family’s presence for Christmas we spent the holiday out at Cabanas de los Cerezos on Lago 4, halfway between Rio Pico and Las Pampas. Mike and Erin were up for fishing a bit so we first hit Lago la Pava and Lago 2 in the boat, but the weather wasn’t cooperative so we retreated to Arroyo Negro below Tres Valles ranch.

Mike and Erin both got into some nice browns on stimulators and hoppers, as we made our way up from the lower field stretches into the canyon and up to the falls. When the weather cleared though it was back out on the lakes, launching the driftboat from Los Cerezos onto Lago 4 where Mike proceeded to catch 17 fish in less than two hours!

This strange front we are experiencing closed back in on us though there at the end, and the view looking west towards Lago Verde in Chile communicated in no uncertain terms that it was time for a nice warm fire and some yummy homemade European Hare stew back in the cabin.

One of my earliest memories in the woods is of hunting mushrooms as a kid with my Dad on the Deer Farm outside Hayward, Wisconsin. The memories are good ones. I have no idea why the interest in mushrooms didn’t stick with me like my interest in the hunting and fishing did, but I can honestly say that it has experienced a resurgence, and oddly enough, due to the exact same mushroom we hunted so many years ago in the North woods, the Morel. Morchella intermedia Boudier to be exact. These tasty mushrooms apparently pop up everywhere around here this time of year, and if you can train your eyes to see them as you walk along you can collect quite a few. I am not too good at it yet, but I am hoping to get better before the season ends.

It is hard to divide my focus between the ground ahead of me, the birds above me, and the water beyond the foreground, and the trout it hides, which incessantly pull at my eyes. In fact they pulled so hard today while I was out mushroom hunting that I was forced to unsheathe the rod from my pack and go looking for them, this nice brown coming to hand against the wind in the middle of the afternoon.

I took Mario Garcia, keeper of Cabanas Toldos on Lago 3 and an all around great guy to spend any sort of time with, out on the lake for a bit of fishing this afternoon in the newly arrived Aire raft with its NRS fishing frame. This is actually the same boat sold by Castaway, just with different markings, and we bought it with the idea that it will be an easy to move around driftboat of sorts, capable of handling heavy whitewater in the areas rivers but also comfortable enough for a calm day of rowing and casting on the lakes. Today turned out to be mostly calm, that is until Mario hooked a bruiser of a big male brown, which broke the tranquil mood in the boat at least for the time it took to bring the fish to hand.

This photograph is now being printed in Esquel and is soon to hang on the wall behind the counter in Mario’s store at the Cabanas.

Had to head over to Pucon, Chile this week to pick up a few things for the boat, but found out when we got there that the stuff was stuck in aduana up in Santiago. Too far from Chubut to want to make the trip twice we decided to wait the delay out and headed out to the coast with our tent.

The little town of Valdivia turned out to be a pretty neat place though, so we hung out for a few days eating sea urchin roe and grilled salmon, and exploring the coastline throwing trout flies at unidentified saltwater species from the beaches. This town is home to the Kunstman brewery, which we visited to sample the wares, and is the base for a large commercial fishery as well. The seafood markets were just incredible, complete with resident sea-lions on the docks waiting to be thrown the scraps.

An interesting couple of days, but upon crossing back into Argentina through the pass at the active Lanin volcano and headed back along the beautiful Rio Alumine and its tributary the Rio Malleo I must admit I was glad to be headed home. No offense to you Chile types, but the East slope of the Andes has the light that spins my heart for a loop every time.

Hi Everyone! Ana and I have settled in to our new home in Rio Pico, unpacked and painted, organized the house and set up the shop; today it was time to go fishing! It was also apparently time for us to get a foot or so of spring snow. I started the day out in decent weather on Lago 1 and got into the brown trout pretty good on my “Green Giant” streamers, but by the time I switched locations and put the float tube in up on Lago La Isla the bottom had fallen out.

I caught a couple of nice rainbows and then lost all feeling in my hands as the water from my stripping did its best to freeze them to the line as I pulled it from the lake. On the way home it seemed as though even the gauchos and their dogs had been caught a bit off guard by the front, and I was one happy fly fisherman when I peeled my waders off in the foyer and Ana handed me a freshly poured Mate at the door.