Opening day is an exciting time for many anglers and is like Christmas Day and my Birthday all rolled into one for me. As the main season begins, with it comes the opportunity to fish for trout that haven’t seen a fly or been disturbed by anglers for several months. Although temperatures are cooler and the weather can be a little less settled, the attraction of finding often naive fish ready to nail your fly is hard to resist.
A few days out from the 1st of October (“Opening Day”) and a check of the weather and river flows helped to make the decision that we would head for the West Coast for Opening Day. I usually try to get to the West Coast for most openings as the allure of the pristine scenery experienced whilst fishing is addictive, and keeps me coming back time and time again.
My friend and I drove the three hours from Christchurch the day before opening to greet our farmer friend who owned the property that the river we wanted to fish flowed through. After a brief catch up and the pitching of our tents, an initial scout of the river revealed trout on station feeding happily, unaware of the dramas that they would encounter tomorrow on Opening Day.
A little Opening Day paranoia associated with thinking that some other anglers would sneak ahead of us on the river as we slept resulted in a pretty mediocre night’s sleep. However, an early rise and set-up soothed the nerves as we readied to cast to the first sighted fish. It wasn’t long until my friend had his first opportunity. A healthy 4lb brown was feeding nicely at the entrance to a little backwater and happily nailed his weighted green caddis nymph on the second drift. It came to the net after a brief fight revealing a few presumably spawning related battle scars on its otherwise beautifully patterned skin.
My friend was understandably happy to have got on the board so quickly and I followed within minutes with another slightly smaller brown sitting further up in the backwater. A good feeling! We continued on upstream and encountered a reasonable number of fish for the day. Most fish were more than happy to engulf our offerings of a combination of tungsten bread heads and low profile trailing dropper nymphs. As the day warmed up we started to experiment with a few terrestrial patterns. Some CDC emerger and adult caddis patterns in smaller sizes were happily taken by the browns, however the odd mistimed strike and parting knot resulted in several frustrating fish losses. Most fish landed were in the 4 to 5lb range but a slightly better conditioned 6.5lb Brown was caught later in the day. Opening Day was all in all a success with beautiful West Coast scenery, good weather and reasonable numbers of fish landed.
Day 2
The following day we were a little more limited on good fishing options as a lot of the nearby water had been fished the previous day by other anglers. The obvious angler footprints spotted along the water’s edge of our chosen section of water for the day left us with a little less hope of an eventful day ahead. However, we had clear water, fine weather and we were in a beautiful area so it was just great to be out on the water. As expected the fish we encountered were on edge and quite selective but despite this we were able to achieve 7 takes from the 10 fish we fished for. Unfortunately luck was not on our side as through a combination of missed take’s and snapping off on two nice fish we attained absolutely terrible stats for the day, only landing one fish. However despite little success we still had an enjoyable time on the water.