When you want to go fishing and can't,
Console yourself with our gazette.

TROUT FISHING WITH MAURICE RODWAY - Weekly Column: February 7, 2002
 Southland, New Zealand

A River's Friends - For Mike Roche

Surface glare from the water's surface is like a shiny lace curtain that is draped across a window, concealing the activities within. Trees on a river's bank open windows into its waters. Where trees stand like sentinels on the bank and the sun shines from above, trout in the shallow riffles can be more easily seen. When they oversee the drifting mayflies they dart and turn, making them obvious to the practised eye. Boulders and stones, on their journey from mountain to sand form an abstract painting of the beginnings and the end of life itself.

For anglers, trees are an essential element of a river, not only to expose its secrets, but to shelter it and those who wander along its banks. Some anglers, like trees are part of the river too. To these the river is a book from which they gain understanding and into which they write poems and songs.

Rivers need these anglers. Without them their banks become lonelier places. Their waters lose some of their smile. Riffles creased with laughter become furrowed and forlorn. Anglers whose lines lay gently beside trout, and whose trout they often return are like the trees, their steadfast guardians.

When threats appear they are ready to defend them, and they won't be easily swayed.

Rivers need anglers who can see into waters and who give more than they take.

But rivers are immortal and anglers not so. Those who take a trout but care naught to return anything are soon forgotten.  Those who help cleanse the flow, who cause a tree to be planted or who encourage others to do so too leave a smile in the riffles.

Last weekend the Mataura lost a guardian, and a friend of many others. Now there is a danger that the words of the river will be lost in the winds of progress and the colours of riverbed stones tarnished with silt from the promise of profit from the remains of a tussock filled gully.

For Mike the river's tears flowed. His departure, like yellowed leaves lost in an autumn wind, weakened the curtain of care.

A river's friends are precious part of its fabric. Their loss is felt across the watershed. The balance of those that find pictures and poems in their waters and those that muddy them has shifted slightly.  Let it be only a brief time before the fulcrum moves back again.

Maurice Rodway
Southland, New Zealand                           E-mail: mrodway@southlandfishgame.co.nz

Article © 2002 Maurice Rodway, All Rights Reserved.

Return to Maurice's Columns 2001-2002

'00 Columns    |   '99 Columns   |   '98 Columns   |   ´97-´98 Columns

Frontier Fishing Gazette has been published
every week for over one week.

trout@frontierfishing.co.nz

RIVER REPORT   |   MAURICE'S COLUMN   |   FISH OF THE MONTH

Introduction | Main Pool |  Rules | Bliss in Te Anau | Southland Angling Bible

Trout Encounters | River Descriptions | Fishing in Southland | Ring-A-River | Salmon Days

First Publication: 29 September 1996, Updated 01-Mar-03.
©1996-2002 NZ Country Matters Ltd.

Frontier Fishing is a South Island, NZ-based, owned and operated enterprise.