The weather forecast for the weekend does not look good.
Despite that there are opportunities to catch trout.
Many smaller streams rose slightly midweek but are dropping again and are well within the good fishing range.
Many anglers do not like cold southwest winds for fishing as they make life a bit uncomfortable, however, southwesterlies indicate rising atmospheric pressure and trout like that.
Some of the best fishing I have ever had has been on cold southwesterly days. Often under such conditions there are good hatches of mayfly and the trout definitely like mayflies. Most of the small rain-fed streams should be worth fishing this weekend unless there is last-minute heavy rain. The snow that is forecast for the hills should ensure that there is no rapid run off resulting in river levels rising.
One stream that you might wish to avoid is the Waipahi as that is the location of the Waipahi Gold Medal fly fishing competition on Saturday. About 40 anglers will be spread throughout the length of the river trying to catch the best five-fish bag of trout. Each angler will have drawn a section of river and will fish that for the day. Once the draw is out there is lots of speculation about who the likely medallists will be. The only thing I have learned over the 30 years that I have fished this competition is that it is unpredictable. Picking six of the top 10 is much easier but the top three is a different proposition.
But if the result was that predictable the competition would lose its attraction. This year information on the trout caught is being collected by Fish and Game Otago to monitor the state of the fishery. I will give a round-up of the event next week.
Last weekend predictably Murray Smart and I headed south. I suggested in last week's column that there would be some small streams that would be fishable. And so there were.
We fished two of them. The first was a very small stream that I had not fished before despite driving past it on hundreds of occasions. We gave it a couple of hours in the morning and although we saw very few fish, we managed to catch a couple.
Moving on to the stream that the first one flowed into, a much bigger water, we fished out the rest of the day. There were quite a few flies on the water, sedges, mayflies and stoneflies, but very few rises. We fished blind with nymphs and Murray got a fish in the first ripple. Further on I saw a fish take something just below the surface and it took my nymph.
After an hour or so the number of mayflies increased but still no rises although one ripple produced several fish. This ripple was at the head of a long deep flat and long deep flats tend to hold good numbers of fish, so it was a likely spot. Then it was all over despite another hour or so flogging the water.
- Mike Weddell
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