My mate Col skillfully netting a nice brown I caught.
My mate Col getting some tips from our guide Peter Fordham.
Climbing one of the hills to get into Peter's secret 'hot spot'.
Col dressed for bear.
Col selecting a secret fly to catch the 'big one'.
Col landing a fish down a 8 foot embankment - what a mate!
Nice brown hooked in a foot of water by me! 
Couple of nice silvers pulled from 'daves hole'.
My good mate Colin and I made our annual overseas journey to do our fly fishing adventure the five days leading up to Melbourne Cup. The trip stared off with me arriving in Auckland and having my SIMS boots promptly confiscated by NZCustoms as the soles are felt and titanium spiked. Any felt boots are now banned in NZ due to the outbreak of Rock Snot in many of the streams in South NZ. The fear is that felt shoes can transport the spores of Rock Snot from one location to another. Therefore felt shoes are bannd. This year we travelled to Turangi and fished the Back Country and local streams of the Tongariro. Using local guide Peter Fordham on the first day we found ourselves in the BackCounty fishing streams not visited this year. NZ turned on the wind for us providing very challenging conditions. A couple of changes of location and Peter put us onto some superb cracking fish. All around the 3 pound plus mark. Col and I managed a nice pair of Silvers which Peter kindly took back to Taupo and arranged to have smoked for us to bring back to Aussie. The next 4 days Col and I spent our time wandering the many local streams and runs chasing rainbow and brown trout. The first few days were very windy and made fishing a case of moving from one location to another to find a spot in a sheltered spot, or resorting to waiting between gusts to make a cast. All fish averaged 3 plus pounds in weight. The largest fish we landed was a 5.3 pound frisky brown trout. One place that kept producing cracker fish for us was a location that Colin discovered called Delatours Pool (later renamed 'Daves Hole') which is at the end of a rather bumpy dirt road trail .. then a short walk through blackberry to a bend in a creek which has a drop off 10 feet down to the water. Its a shear drop off where the creek has erroded away the bank. When we arrived I polarioded 5 fish sitting about 30 feet out, and up river of us. Col and I had a laugh at the rediculous position and that it would be impossible to get a cast out to the fish, let alone land one if you manged to hook it. Directly behind your casting position is 10 foot of blackberry bush. Blackberry cuttings of branched are all over the ground, so you'd have to keep the loops of free fly line backing in your hand and let them out as you brought your line up to distance. Role casting is impossible. So the whoe thing looked rediculous and we were about to walk down stream when I said - let me have a crack at this. Attempting the impossible, third cast I got the flies in the right place and saw the fish swim up, open its mouth and take the fly. Game on! What started out as laughter soon turned to a lot of "oh shit - what do we do now"? There was nothing for it but for Col to chin down the drop off and balance on 8 inches of bank that dropped off into 15 foot of raging water. It was the stuff of legends. The fish was played into submission and skillfully netted by master netter Col Parkes! Thinking this first fish was a lucky fluke, I set about casting at the impossible and ... bang ... another fish fell to a small gold bead nymph. Chaos followed, but with the same net result - a beautiful 3 pound plus silver rainbow trout (called a jack?) ... over the next couple of days we revisited Daves Hole and managed a pull a couple of superb fish each time. Each time the water was so crystal clear we could see the fish swim up to the fly, open its mouth, and then the fun and games followed. The trip to NZ was fantastic with many quality fish being landed. We're now wondering what part of the world to travel to for our next annual pre Cup Day trip will be??
