A GUIDE’S LIFE
•
BY HAYDEN MELLSOP
A Good Pair of Eyes
W
e hunkered down at the edge of the clearing, clutching our hats close while the helicopter lifted off, peppering us in a shower of grit and leaves. Standing as it banked downstream and disappeared over the ridge line, we were left to the murmur of the river. I handed Bill his rod case. “Rig this up and join me upstream. I’m going to move up to the next pool and see if I can spot a fish.” Few things clear my mind from the residue of the noise and metallic confines of a helicopter better than standing quietly, centering my breathing and staring into moving water. Before beginning the process of spotting a trout, I stood for a couple of minutes with eyes closed, breathing deep and slow. The sun quartered across my right shoulder, burning off what remained of morning’s cool. Cicadas rasped their song from the surrounding manuka and beech, and somewhere nearby a tui cackled from its perch. I opened my eyes. The pool in question was shaped like an elongated teardrop, narrow and turbulent at its head where the water spilled into it from the small rapid above. As the water’s velocity slowed it fanned wider and shallower until where I stood at its tail it flowed clear as gin and smooth as glass over cobbles of red, ochre and grey. Here in the Kiwi backcountry, a good pair of eyes are just as important to angling success as a good cast. Second is patience, a virtue essential to any attempt to detect a quarry whose
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High Country Angler • Summer 2021
very survival depends on not being seen, on blending into its surroundings like a dream into ether. Keeping to the bushes that lined the bank, I stared into the shallow end of the pool, looking not at the water but through it, my attention on the detail of the bed over which it flowed. I hoped there would not be a fish resting here. A mere shadow cast by a line in the air over the water would be sufficient to spook it up into the deeper water of the head of the pool, putting down any fish that may be holding there along the way. Mentally, I laid a grid out over the water, methodically searching each square for the hint of a fish - a torpedo shape lying among the donuts, the wisp of a shadow playing on the cobbled bed, but nothing appeared out of place. After a few minutes I felt Bill’s presence at my shoulder. “Take a look. Let me know if you see anything while I tie on a fly.” I took the rod from Bill and retreated deeper into the bushes before selecting and tying on a big dry. We moved on up the bank, ten feet at a time, pausing to repeat the process - grid, scan, grid, scan - until we were halfway up to the pool’s head. Here the water deepened, taking on a greenish hue. Only the larger rocks of the bed were now visible, the rest an indeterminate, mottled blur. The current pulsed and swirled, slow moving boils throwing shadows that took on the guise of an undulating fish before vanishing as quickly as they appeared.
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