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TROUT FISHING WITH MAURICE RODWAY - Weekly Column: 07-April-00
 Southland, New Zealand

Salmon Days

Rain and snow that falls on the  highest peak in New Zealand eventually helps fill the mighty Waitaki. Its waters gather from over a thousand valleys and a score of glaciers. By the time it approaches the sea just north of Oamaru it is one our most magnificent rivers.

Its a river that also gathers in salmon anglers. Their visit coincides with the journey of quinnat salmon from the Pacific Ocean, a journey that started in the river gravel two or three years before. Most return to the river in February or early March. This year however the salmon are a little tardy so there are still fresh fish in the river now. 

The salmon season has been rather poor by all accounts but those who have been disappointed so far might just still be able to improve this year's score over the next couple of weeks.

Salmon fishing is more than a bright fish on the bank. Most realistic anglers consider it a bonus.  Catch rates are measured as days per salmon. Trout fishers hope for fish per hour.  While salmon will come to persistent anglers who have the right gear, and who know where, when and how to fish it, there are many fishless hours, even for the experts.

But salmon days are not wasted. Just being on the Waitaki is reward.  It is a fearsome torrent. It races downstream amongst the skeletons of willows. Bones sticking skywards. From them water spraying out. Its a vibrant, ever changing kaleidoscope of life. Autumn poplars puncuate the river margin with golden exclamation marks while crack willows along the edge tremble with worry at the approach of the rushing waters.

In most rivers crack willows tend to smother the river and permeate its every pore but the Waitaki is a graveyard for these trees. The river waters clutch whole trees and wrench them from the shore, leaving them upended, life gradually draining.  Their carcasses  are strewn over the bed. They lie in abandoned channels, roots gnarled from an embrace with the river's rocks. Like a predator and its prey, the willow still grows, and will never be extinguished, but some will be taken regularly and the river's belly always has room for more.  

Blacked capped Caspian terns, with metre wide wings survey shallow eddies. Pied stilts, in long legged flocks, swallows with wind proof wings, and mallards, always wary, share the river.

Most anglers fret more about whether the eddy they are fishing has some snappy salmon in it and whether they will hook a silver slice of the sea or a tarnished fish that has lost is glory.

But some look up in the hours between fish and see in the river's wonderful landscape and the lives of the quick and the dead.

Maurice Rodway
Southland, New Zealand                          





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Article © 2000 Maurice Rodway, All Rights Reserved.

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First Publication: 29 September 1996, Updated 01-Mar-03.
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