GOING FISHING with Kotare

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34107, 20 March 1976, Page 10

GOING FISHING with Kotare

Half a mile of manuka, tussock, grass, toitoi. dryish swampland and shallow river crossings brought us to the edge of what remains of the Hineniaiaia Dam. Wp parked our manuka staves >n the firming silt and tackled up. Gary had been to the dam many times. It had taken him seven years of occasional visiting to hook one of the elusive resident American brook trout, or fontinalis that rarest of the exotic trouts in New Zealand. So my own chances of success on a first visit were slim. They weren’t helped by the little Bft fibreglass rod and the No. 5 floating line either, tackle appropriate enough to the size of the fish but not to the stiff breeze that funnelled down from the high country into the sleep-sided canyon around Once, more than 1(H) acres of deep water lay hacked up behind the upper Hinemaiaia Dam. Now the pumice silt of years. brought down ceaselessly by the stream, has crowded out all but about four or five acres of open water from the impoundment. It’s an odd place. On the one hand it gives the angler something of the impression of a wild upland loch in a swampy setting. On the other, it gives him a feeling of yet another partial failure on the part of man which nature is irresistibly reclaiming.

Maybe the hydro-elec-tric engineers of the time calculated to a nicety the number of years that power could be generated before the whole place silted up. If so. they probably set their sights on the year 1980 as the other end of the time-span, giving the small hydro-electric scheme about a 30-year life before the lake inevitably 'solidified.'

So perhaps in three years time what’s left of the brook trout community will be confined to an area about the size of an Olympic pool: and so. in theory anyway, far easier to find than they are now.

But we really didn’t search very far, Gary and 1, before Gary had a touch, a hesitant, comingshort sort of take that immediately lifted our spirits, putting them up with the Canada geese that undulated across the canyon from time to time. Then. Io and behold, a broad back showed for a moment. 30 yards out, before slipping below the surface again Gary who casts a fly 35 yards without undue effort, threw for the fish time and again, his flowing line starkly white against the • background cliff. The fish could have been a 5-pounder. one of the bigger members of the community that lives, unchallenged by rainbow or brown trout cousins, above the Hinemaiaia Dam. Local experience suggests that a 61b fontinalis would be a rarity, but fish have certainly been taken up to 5Mb over the 24 years since they were first introduced to the waler in 1952. Young Eddie landed one only a few weeks ago that weighed 4 lib. He ale it. Sacrilege? Well, yes, but only if. unlike young Eddie, your pocket’s long enough to pay the taxidermist. In the beginning, the very first beginning of the community 50 to 60 miles north of the darn, the fontinalis were small stunted fish. They were discovered above a log dam across a remote Rotorua stream, where their presence had been unsuspected for perhaps 50 years. The colony was netted out, transported to hatchery ponds at Ngongotaha, fattened up, and transferred to the new hydro lake formed by the Hinemaiaia Dam in 1952. Not a great many anglers have fished for them. The road in from State Highway One is somewhat inhibiting for anglers in ordinary private cars. A sign at the turnoff actually prohibits vehicles in rainy or frosty weather. We’d chosen a March evening to go in, after work, in weather that,

quite uncharacteristically so far this year, had re-

mained dry, and even mostly sunny, for well over two weeks. You can take a fork leading to the dam structure itself, or- continue round the valley as we did, parking the car a good half-mile from the fishing. As with every water, however, you must know what the fish feed on before you can begin to catch fish consistently. I'd love to spend a whole day up there just fossicking around, lifting rocks and old waterlogged bits of pumice from the channels that feed the remains of the lake, watching for nymphs and mayflies, caddis and sedge flies, dragonfly nymphs, small fish, and crustaceans. For the strange thing is that, despite an alleged abundance of dragonfly nymphs and snails, the lure that seems to interest the brook trout most is a number 6 or 8 Red Setter. Eddie toqk his d'pounder on a Red Setter. Gary had his touch on a Red Seller. And yet he had found mayfly nymphs and big red Chironimid larvae under a rock in the shallows. i changed over from a Green Orbit to a Red Setter, and almost immediately got a touch. Like Gary’s it was a halfhearted pull, as though the fish was as gloomily conscious as we were that the days of the lake were numbered. And then, 10 minutes after the sun had sunk below the top of the cliff opposite, and the line of grounded Canada geese to our right was discussing the day in the way geese have, and I was dreamily retrieving the lure, the line went slowly tight. I pulled hesitantly to free the hook from the bottom, and a brook trout of 21b or so leaped out of the water not ten yards away, threw the lure, and went away at great speed.

I said that crisp and comforting monosyllable one says on such occasions. Gary laughed, and the geese honked, and then it was time to find our way back across the swamp in the gathering dark while we could still sec our landmarks.