from Axminster & Lyme Cancer Support The Tongariro River By Nick Fisher

The Tongariro River

By Nick Fisher

Man has mucked about with Nature all over the world. And most of the time we’ve made a right dog’s dinner of it. We fiddle around with the finely tuned instrument of elements and turn a beautiful harmony into a nightmarish wail.

But in the lakes and rivers of New Zealand, for once we got it right. Before we came along, the vast deep volcanic lake of Taupo and the thundering rush of the Tongariro river were virtually fishless. From them we created a true Temple of Sport. Onto a bare canvas, we accidentally painted a masterpiece.

Before the late 19th century, the freshwaters of New Zealand were a sad place, with nothing but eels, whitebait and a couple of species of ugly rock fish. In their hunger for colonisation, the British saw fit, not only to send human envoys off to lay claim to far-flung territories, we also sent our fine, feisty, spotted trout too.

The first consignment of brown trout to arrive in New Zealand came from England, via Tasmania. By 1916, it was estimated that over 50 million finger-sized trout had been released, haphazardly, into various streams around the North and South islands.

Trout loved New Zealand. They went mad for it. They bred rampantly and grew like mutant monsters, reaching sizes undreamt of, even in the wild nocturnal duvet-stirrings of English fly-fishing fanatics. Some trout even took it on themselves to swim out to sea, and round the coast to seed new rivers.

New Zealand rapidly developed some of the most heart-stopping fly-fishing water in the world. And consequently established a vital high-protein food source for settlers and native Maoris alike.

If you want to eat trout in New Zealand though, you’ve got to catch it yourself. As a way of preserving any poaching or misuse of this silver gleaming asset, the government declared it illegal to buy or sell salmon trutta.

And if you’re going to catch trout in New Zealand, the Tongariro river isn’t the easiest place to start but it’s

by far the most exciting.

The source of the Tongariro gushes out of the eastern flank of the grumbling volcanic Mount Ruapehu. From there it hurtles like a joy-rider with a death-wish north, to the southern end of Lake Taupo where it skids to a halt in a vast, swampy fivemouthed delta.

England is the birthplace of modern fly-fishing. And the perfectly manicured river Test, which glides it’s crystal clear sedate path through leafy Hampshire, is the Father of all fly-fishing rivers. Needless to say, since the first trout were introduced into the Tongariro in 1898, many Englishmen have made a pilgrimage to see the progeny of their babbling chalk streams. And brother have they got a shock!

Back home trout fishing is a gentle art of fine lines and tiny imitative flies. On the Tongariro, it’s a snarling, blood-letting battle of heavy-leaded nymphs, fierce dangerous currents and rocket-powered monsters possessed by the devil.

As O.S. Hintz wrote in 1955 in Trout On Taupo; “The Tongariro is a river of heroic proportions. It swaggers and roars and proclaims its vigour with no mock modesty. It will sweep along boulders the size of a medicine ball. It is not a trout stream; it is a salmon river.”

Even the names of the individual pools are heavy duty; like The Gun, The Stump and The Dreadnought. Yet still, in its comparatively short angling history it has become a legend. By 1929, dour Scots angling journalist A. Mathewson declared it “The World’s finest trout river” in his report in the Weekly News.

He even went on to do the unimaginable and declare its fish finer than his own country’s finest. “The Tongariro trout are by far the finest in the world. They cannot be compared with the trout of Scotland. Besides being extraordinarily good fighters, they are actually more lively than salmon of equal size.”

Angling books are stuffed with glowing prose in praise of the Tongariro trout. But there’s a downside to doing battle in this piscatorial paradise, as Malcolm Ross wrote in a 1927 edition of The New Zealand Shooting And Fishing Gazette.

“Our camp was near a swamp that was a prolific breeding ground of mosquitoes. And they swarmed into the tents in the thousands. Being without mosquito nets we resorted to anointing the hands and face with kerosene. This gave temporary relief, but with sleep came the evaporation of the oil and the fight was on again.

These Tongariro mosquitoes were simply revelling in a change of diet. They had discovered it was easy to pierce the tender skin of a whiteman and that there was a flavour in his blood, a corpuscular delicacy perhaps, that was absent from the blood of his darkskinned Maori brother.

For every one we killed a hundred came to the funeral, and, the funeral hymn having been chanted, the living, in thousands, sought revenge. The battle ravaged throughout the night. Dawn saw us victorious, but bleeding from out wounds.”

In the century of trout feeding, fighting and fornicating in the Tongariro, they’ve been visited by royalty, aristocracy and even American presidents. But one of the first, and most famous visitors was millionaire cowboy western novelist Zane Grey.

Invited by the New Zealand government to come and sample the delights of big game marlin fishing around the Bay of Islands, Grey soon heard talk of the Tongariro trout. So, he abandoned his enormous schooner and set forth into the heartland of North Island.

Zane Grey got his rod bent mercilessly by the trout of the Tongariro and wrote at length of the specimen rainbows he caught, up to 17 pounds. In one of his fishing journals he pays ultimate tribute to New Zealand, by renaming it ‘The Anglers’ Eldorado’.

According to one story, Zane Grey was so taken by the magnificent fish of the Tongariro, that he tried to buy the river. At the time much of it belonged to the Maoris and the deal was very nearly struck, until the New Zealand government stepped in and banned the sale.

Personally, I can’t blame the man for wanting to own what is probably the best trout river in the world. But for me, the greatest joy of the Tongariro, like every other New Zealand river, is it’s accessibility. So long as you’ve bought a fishing licence, you can fish the length of the Tongariro, from it’s flat sandy delta full of angry white-bait feeding rainbows, to it’s ferocious foaming headwaters stuffed with ugly kypejawed browns, for absolutely free.