We drove up
from nice dead end Okarito to not so nice through traffic Hari Hari. No the
name is not a joke. But driving there we found a person right to the village
sign being photographed by his partner – might be he was German and his name
Hari – har har har. And there was a pile of filled plastic bags with a sign
saying “My pony’s poos – 50cent a bag” – selling horse shit as fertilizer. In
Europe they sell horse meat as beef. Unfortunately I always wanted but did not
take a picture of that pile.
We found a
not so perfect but ok motel accommodation (Flax Bush – not much choice in Double
Hari) with some cats and a confiding neighbors cat (here are the cats in case you wondered about the hint in the
last post). Part of the cleaning ceremony of the room – we waited for that –
was to use some awfully smelling room deodorant. It smelled like in a catholic
church after a real heavy incense ceremony. I immediately felt being beamed to
a church in Bavaria and was about ready to go to the Biergarten.
Double Hari
is located just right on one of these rather large West Coast diary plains. In
a couple of these landscapes there are nice spring creeks. Rather famous and
except the best known – La Fontaine – rather short, thus most of them take one
fisherman every few days. But most of them get fished more frequently. And
exactly that was the bad and the good in our case. The plan was to fish one of
the smaller creeks north of Double Hari. We drove there and on the access track
we passed a fisherman that obviously had finished to fish exactly the stretch
we wanted to fish. Communication with him (!) we figured out he was a fly
fishing enthusiast from France traveling around the world to fish. We shared
information and he mentioned that he had good fishing on the two km of fishable
water on that particular creek. Still I decided to fish behind him – some
curiosity how his fishing would have affected the fish. He mentioned a specific
nymph – a nymph I normally would never have fished, as it is far from anything
real. I call it the ESPT. He showed me this fly – I never had one of
these and never fished it before.
Further
down the track we parked the car, had a lunch snack and prepared our gear. The
3F (fly fishing French aka Ludovic) arrived and after a while he came to me and
asked if we would have a GoPro as he saw a fixture for it on the side mirror.
He needed some help with it to get his data of two weeks fishing to an external
storage. I proposed he should come over at night to our motel and we could take
care of that. After a while he came back again with two of his ESPT
nymphs – wow cool!
Fishing
behind the 3F was tough. Saw several fish but rather spooky (no surprise). I
ended up catching one and after around two hours I quit, Ines had turned around
a little while before and came towards me with the Prado. Fishing behind
somebody is definitely a challenge or just idiotic. Later that evening I tried to fish a small creek on top of the well known. But the water level was very low and the creek pretty much grown over by water plants.
This night
we took care of the GoPro issue, Ludovic could for the first time watch his
filmed 17+ minutes fight with a brown trout that I would assume was around double
figure or even well in the doubles – he estimated it less. In my opinion the use of a landing net might
have shortened the fight considerably. We sat long outside, drinking beer
(Thanks!), being eaten by the mosquitos (Tobias was sleeping inside) and
chatting about fishing. A nice fly heads evening. Besides his fishing success stories
he had another interesting story to tell. As mentioned in a post some weeks ago
there is a highly visible small fly shop some 50km south of QT close to
Garston, I mentioned the lady there doing her job. Ludovic had an even stranger
encounter with her. She treated him rather impolite and pretty much booted him
out. Might be she was afraid of him because he was unshaved and not freshly
showered and dressed? I guess every third trout bum entering that shop looks
like that. I just mention that here because we thought she might have had a bad
day as we were there, but it seems she had a bad month. Travelers’ advice:
stock up on fly gear in QT and just pass by the hut in Athol. Or if you want to
experience something special: go there and ask a few questions.
The next
morning I set the alarm clock to 6am to get to the river (the major spring
creek close by) before dusk to fish the morning rise to be able to fish to some
active fish – at least that was the plan. I was at the river well before the
sun. I watched a nice sun climbing over the horizon, mist being evaporated by
the increasing strength of the sun, a hurdle cows relocating from one paddock
to the other as driven by a magic hand, but what I did not even see was trout
at all, not to speak about active feeding trout. There was nothing on the
river! Nothing! Might be some body used some 1080 the night before. A nice
early morning on the water that totally destroyed my sleep-balance. It was
funny to stay and wait for three hours on a river that was supposed to be full
of fish without seeing any animal besides bees doing their work and farting
cows.
I was back
with Ines and Tobias close to 11am. What to do with this day? A drive to the
small village Ross. There we found a cafe and a gallery with an original
etching of Pauline Bellamy that I was close to buy but did hesitate. She seems
to be a relevant NZ artist – what finally made me hesitate to buy that non
cheap print was here overall wired oeuvre. On the way back we passed a small
creek that I wanted to give a few casts. Ines and Tobias drove to the nearby
ocean and I was given two hours to fish. I did pretty well ; ) and caught 4 nice
trout and lost another two or three. All on: Blow Fly! I was warned about this
river ‘if fish are too spooky leave the place’ – I found them very cooperative. All
around 4 to +5 lbs. I saved some of the relevant water to give it a chance the
day after with Ines, so I had to walk a longer stretch via the road and a farm
track to the designated meeting point upriver to avoid spooking the fish.
We went
back to Double Hari, had a decent fish burger at the local hangout (I cannot
call that restaurant) and I was off again to fish the creek from the morning
for the evening hatch. Third time fishing on that day! The evening hatch was
much longer than the non-existing morning rise: exactly 10 minutes and about five
fish made use of the surface feeding option. I made use of this time slot and
caught one. Strange creek – I must have fished on the wrong day.
After and
other night in Double Haris Hilton we drove towards one of three larger
villages on the West Coast: Hokitika. Before that we gave the saved upper part
of yesterday’s afternoon creek a go. I tried to guide Ines. But I saw only two
fish at all which were a little bit unforgiving to Ines. Seems like that creek
is really less interesting further up above the bridge.
In Hokitika: Greenstone on every corner – three years ago these pieces where cheaper or? Right at that weekend there was the Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika. A Festival more of wild people and music than of wild food.
Just after we did our groceries before going to the festival, we were right outside on the parking lot packing the goods to the car, an acrobatics show started on the blue sky. Five yellow painted stunt planes did some fascinating figures. That was the perfect target for the Canon 70-200mm, 2,8 IS II! What we saw was the “The Red Checkers - RNZAF Aerobatics Team”.
The real wild food such as beef tactical sausages, worms or cicada was not available or we did not find it due to not looking intensively for such tastes (as Ines announced it a few days ago I was already looking very forward to some exotic gourmet thing …). So we went for the sold burger option: ciabatta instead of a bun and as desert strawberries with ice. Picking some beer I thought the beer selling person wanted to make fun of me has he said he could only sell me one mug of beer at a time. So I had to go a couple of times. In Munich you can order 10 liters at once on that specific big Touristparty in late September. Here you would have to go 30 times to get 10 liters – the Kiwis care more about your health!
Most of the people at the festival were dressed in some more or less funny costumes. Most of them having fun and about to get drunk. We did our part of irritating the people by letting Tobias freely push his stroller over the area, so even some semi drunk guests and the Police asked us if the happy smiling adorable baby would be ours. Fun afternoon – even if there was no fishing involved!
Our
campsite for the night was DOC at Lake Mahinapua – a nice site that got really busy
that night, but everybody was quiet. We were lucky as we pitched our tent at
early afternoon before going to the festival. Among all the guests we finished
cooking latest (delicious lamb chops) – we made it just before the official
quiet hour on that campground at 10 pm.
