EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

We headed up to the Rangitikei River late Sunday morning for a few hours of fishing.  We accessed the river at the Vinegar Hill camping area, the farthest spot downstream we’ve tried yet.  In the campground you can park right on the bank and there are a number of access points as the river bends around the campground on the inside seam of a cliff.  I had my experimental fly on as did Amy, both tied up on our droppers and our point flies were exactly the same, our green flies with 3.5mm silver beads.

There was a surprising number of people camping and a large portion of those appeared to be spin fisherman working their way both up and down the river, so we didn’t have the place to ourselves.  That’s not much of a worry for us though as we were looking for the fast flows in order to french nymph, not the slow pools the spinners prefer.

This was a nice little pool but the pocket at the top was very small and we quickly cleaned the dozen or so fish out of it.

My fly was the hands-down winner of the day.  Although – full disclosure, Amy lost hers a few hours into the day so it wasn’t a totally fair comparison.

Another rainbow falls for my experimental fly.

The river is very different down this low and really best suited to spin fishing.  We only found a small handful of pockets holding fish.  Although I did lose count of the fish we caught, they were all fairly small, 40cm and less.  The spin fishermen we spoke to were having the same result.

A typical rainbow for the day.  They still fight like heavy weights though.

The water was really, really low with lots of weeds and algae clogging the river.  There were some runs that look like they would be fantastic with another 100mm of depth.  On the day they were just too shallow to hold descent fish.  There were also some great dry fly pools which could be fun in summer.

An awesome looking run that didn’t hold many fish and the ones we did catch were just little fellas.

All in all, I didn’t really care for this section of the river.  There were a lot of people and, of course, the rubbish and discarded food containers that comes along with them littering the river bank.  If you drive another 20 minutes north the river is exceptional.  It’s clean and there are hardly any people around.  Perhaps I may stop in on the way back home from farther north during the summer as there could be some really good dry fly fishing in this reach.  It’s almost the weekend again and I’m sure we’ll sneak in a fish somewhere.  Till the next update remember that everything depicted in this blog is done by amateurs in uncontrolled conditions. Do try this at home.