When Dave Jensen and his wife Amelia first visited New Zealand they knew they had to get back. This is how their lives were transformed by the fishing, people and wildlife of New Zealand.
Winter set in a month early here in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, and the dim afternoon light is a drag on our outlooks. The mind’s eye is twitching again. We’re packed - 4000 flies and a few rods. A dream trip years ago has turned into an annual ‘let loose and have a go’. Anyone traveling to fly fish New Zealand is given a quick realization of what is available – the countless publicly accessible rivers, streams, creeks, estuaries, tarn lakes, spring creeks, lakes, canals, etc. You realize that you are, in a way, being challenged to examine the priorities for the rest of your life. If fly fishing in drop-dead stunning scenery, with a massive diversity of available ecosystems is what you want to do with your life but you’re too young to leave your home and move to New Zealand, you’ll need to re-examine and focus your life. After our first trip, that’s exactly what we did. We re-arranged our lives, downsizing our house, eliminating financial liabilities and debts, to experience the freedom of relative worry free fly fishing time in New Zealand.
Perhaps we’re best financially served putting more money into a retirement plan as opposed to spending 3 months each year fly fishing New Zealand’s south island. But, it gets in your blood, obfuscates reality into the clarity of perspective… that you can’t live life without this. In our case, there are no kids to worry about, and we gave the dog away to have this freedom.
Our sixth annual trip now, eh? The first was intimidating. Regions named Canterbury, Otago, Marlborough, and Maori inspired town names like Whataroa, Hari Hari, and Hokitika - all so foreign to a couple of plucky Canadians.
That first trip I was given the rental car keys by a friendly Kiwi - a standard tranny with a left handed stick, to drive on the wrong side of the road, and the road before me a 4 laner with 3 round-abouts in a row to leave the Christchurch airport. A trade to an automatic – control what you can - and were on our way. We were there to fish and for 4 weeks, we took no time off. It was a fly fishing sprint from gate to gate – not knowing if we’d ever return. By the end of those 4 weeks we knew that we’d return, that 4 weeks wasn’t going to cut it, and we’d likely be doing this for the next decade or two so life needed to change.
We’ve been blessed with making good friends with our guide on our first trip. Yes, while we have guided many years on our home waters in Alberta, hiring a guide in New Zealand to teach you sight-fishing is a must, even for a day or two. Serge Bonnafoux (www.fishnewzealand.com) showed us the ropes and was so friendly and giving, only wanting our trip to be a success. Since, he and his wife Sharron have provided us home base on our trips and keep our 4x4 camping van, mountain bikes, and raft all safe and ready for our next trip. We learned quickly that if we’re going to do this annually, rental cars are out of the question and each year we spend 2/3 of our trips camping and the other time in hotels (when the inevitable monsoon-like rains come) and visiting our friends.
Amelia & I have an intensely passionate relationship and we are completely engaged in each other’s lives. We own businesses in the fly fishing industry: a back country lodge, guide company, and multi-media productions. These each require a lot of hard work. Together, we strive to be the best we can – both for ourselves and each other. It’s a challenge to continually strive to better ourselves and “us”. It’s no wonder that we would pick the backstop of New Zealand – where else are you going to find such intimate settings with incredible trout that present such challenges? We engage even the smallest parts of our lives with each other, so why not likewise engage in New Zealand’s waters and the moments they offer? For us, it’s all about seeking the most intimate moments with trout, and that’s what New Zealand is about.
As in life, there are many challenges in New Zealand and many we don’t like. The south island – contrary to what you often read – is a hard ecosystem. We look at the Nor’wester winds that scream across the plains, often at 140kmh or worse; the droughts that often plague the east and south and how that impacts trout movement and concentrates anglers; the oft perpetual monsoons that dump upwards of 600mm of rain in 24 hrs along the west coast and the 10 hour floods. Do you fold tent and go home or rise to the challenge? While I absolutely hate wind, we only get so many days to ‘enjoy’ New Zealand – for better or worse. So, there we are, watching a 10lb brown trout, leaning and squinting into a screaming head wind with a 4 wt rod, cursing the moment we were born and severely agitated. All the while our partner is beside us, the love of our lives, yet a business partner, videographer, and spotter. 3 months each year completely engaged in the fly fishing with each other like that, living mostly out of our van. It takes a great deal of acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, patience. Yes, we’ve missed that plot a few times, but she forgives me.
Allowing each other to be who we are in those moments (taking the good and bad) and simply letting us each be the highest and lowest of who we are is a challenge, especially when camping out in the back of a van for 6 of every 7 days for 3 months, spending 9 to 14 hours a day hiking and fishing. There are a lot of subtle correlations between the emotions felt in marriage and the emotions of fly fishing in challenging, intimate settings. Likewise, it ranges from those hellacious head winds to some of the most delicate, intimate, peaceful scenes.
What draws us to New Zealand today after so much time on previous trips? Our priority in fly fishing stems from a love of photography and videography; the freedom to travel here & there, poking around the countryside; the nervous energy of discovery; and time spent together. The one thing that will always be consistent is the trout themselves – we’ll always have the opportunity to engage another trout but you’ll never get an exact duplication of a moment of the former. And because we love the diversity of where and how we engage trout, the south island of New Zealand is perfect. The west coast is endless, lush rainforests that line and protect the rocky rivers while the forests themselves give way to pastoral valleys that are home to short spring creeks with stunning mountain vista back drops. The high country transcends the mass of water along the tops, becoming a windswept plateau home to tussock grasses and floodplain rivers. The mountains here shed talus slopes that give way to spiders of spring creeks emanating from seemingly nothing, yet used by a few trout that make any day magnificent. The eastern hills are wrought with springs and large rivers, the headwaters of which reach back far enough to collect some of those western rains, carrying flood waters east. The recharge, the fresh, wakes up the drought trodden trout and offers electric fly fishing. The north-central and south-central of the island is most consistent for water flows and temperatures; and the beech forests and manuka groves house streams lined with toi-toi.
The bird life is one of the main draws, and the main reason that, during 3 months of camping, you have to get to bed early. Dawn is preceded by a loud, ever-present chorus of songbirds. The melodic bell-bird is Amelia’s favorite; sitting on a branch belting its chorus: such volume from a palm sized bird. I tend to love the fantails. Often traveling in small flocks of 4 to 6, fantails often follow our route through the bush to get an easy meal of the insects we disturb as we rustle the branches of the understory in beech forests. Their flight is often short - of roller-coaster flips, dives, and glides to the next branch. It’s in those same west coast beech forests that lucky campers are given a loud start to their day with the excitable Kea chortling and cackling. This alpine parrot’s numbers are dwindling and every encounter in the bush is paramount to any trout. And everyone will likely encounter the curious, seemingly brazen weka – a bird that crosses a female mallard with chicken feet. Add in tuis, pukekos, or less common kaka and kiwi amongst scores more, and you quickly realize how productive the landbase is... which gets us back to those trout.
Yes, New Zealand has some incredibly large trout. Our third trip to New Zealand was during a mouse year and some hellaciously large trout took residence in some glorious waters: 7 lb fish the year previous ballooned to over 10. Average fish in mouse years are 7 pound browns. But, behind those magazine cover photos is a secret: the beech forest rivers where the mouse population explodes are targeted for the big fish. Certain waters are almost impossible to find an access without a car parked every km. Some research, back country exploration, and poking around peripheral waters is needed to avoid others. You might not find a consistent barrage of trophy trout, but a 10 foot wide stream chock-full of 4 to 6 pound fish is the Holy Grail for most. These are quite commonly found in all of the regions of the island with any level of exploration, in all of the diverse landscapes and ecosystems. Past the mouse year, the landbase offers an incredible flow of trout forage: the smaller, dark, spring cicadas; large, green summer cicadas; late spring green and brown beetles; grasshoppers; sedges; blowflies; caddis; mayflies; stoneflies; or estuarine gluttons feeding on whitebait. There is ample opportunity for trout to grow large, quickly.
It’s the freedom to go at your own pace with all the above considered that drives our heel as we turn the wheels of our 4x4 van. We take far greater joy in spotting a wee ribbon or water that appears to bubble up from the toe of a slope somewhere 5 or 6km up valley, taking the time to not only hike to find it but to take the time to climb a ridge to take a photo or two along the way. Scouring satellite photos for these tiny ribbons allows us to daydream. As we walk closer we’re always excited at what might lie ahead. Almost every one holds trout, but you don’t know until you arrive what the setting will be, what birds present, what the angle the sun might offer your photography, or if the 3 trout that reside in the small spring are now pooled together due to low water and your first cast best be spot on. What better place and better surroundings to spend 3 months annually!
