The following morning things didn't look like improving much. Our best efforts seemed to be rewarded with fish just big enough to take our flies. Around lunch time I was ready to throw in the towel, but then we saw another fisherman pick up a nice rainbow from the water we had covered only 15 minutes earlier. Ok, the fish were there, it was time to think about what we were doing wrong and start catching some fish. The next bit of water I came across was a deep narrow gutter, almost not worth fishing with regular nymphs. I dug into my fly box and pulled out the biggest, heaviest fly (bomb) I had from a Tongariro trip a few years back. Casting it on a 6 wt rod was close to impossible, tight loops were swapped with roll casts and all forms of flicking and lobbing necessary to get the fly into the water. My first flick resulted in a solid 1.5 pound brown. Few flicks later a 2.5 pound spawning rainbow, followed by a PB of three fish in three casts, all fresh run rainbows of about 2 pounds. Andrew and his dad enjoyed similar kind of success, with his dad, as usual, catching a few more than us. Our good form continued on the lake as well, where the night before we couldn't tempt a single take, this night we all managed to land a couple of fat rainbows each. It was certainly starting to look like a fishing trip now.
On Sunday morning, armed with the knowledge from the day before, we marched to our favourite spots and continued from where we had left off. I caught up with Andrew mid morning and found out that he was doing quite well. He had already landed 6 good fish. I too was having a great time and was stuck in battle with my number twelve. What followed was border line ridiculous. It seemed like I was hooking up on every cast. By lunch time I had landed about 25 fish. Prolonged fights provided by the freshly run rainbows and having to dash 100 m downstream to land each fish on a gravel beach seemed to be the only limit on how many I could catch. That day we totalled over 50 fish. To quote one of my favourite lines from Hustle and Fish, it was one of those truly epic days that you have every now and then.
On Monday it was time to go home, but not before one more short session on the river. We could only afford two hours fishing, but it was enough. In that time we caught over 20 fish between the three of us with Ian landing 11 and hooking a better than average rainbow on the very last cast of the trip. Like I said earlier, it was truly epic. Oh yeah, I also lost a lens out of my Mako sunglasses and the drag on my Lamson ULA reel gave up the ghost. Somehow this didn't seem to bother me one bit...
