Fly Fish New Zealand -Day 1

I was lucky enough to have a window of 4 free days in early October to head away and explore some new water.I had planned on meeting up and fishing with Warwick, a client and good friend from Australia who had some frequent flyer points that needed using up, unfortunately he had to cancel last minute for family reasons.
So i called another good mate Jeremy who lives in Christchurch to see if he was free, he couldn't make the week days to fish but said he would shoot down on Friday after work and fish the Saturday and Sunday with me. I packed the car on the Wednesday and headed of around 6 am with a 3.5 hour drive ahead of me.I arrived at my chosen fishing location around 9.30 am hoping that no one else had the same idea as me to fish the small mountain stream, luckily no one had as the car park was free !

I got into my waders, put my rod together, packed my lunch into my pack and i was ready to hit the water.The river was slightly high due to snow melt but relatively clear.The first 2 pools held a good fish each ,one i spooked with my first cast and the other ate my fly but broke me off under the large willow on the opposite bank ....fish 2 angler 0. I didn't see another fish for about half an hour, all the likely looking water held nothing that was visible so I blind fished through the runs with a well weighted bomb and tiny #18 Pheasant Tail nymph catching a nice 4lb brown at the head of a pool just where the main flow entered .

As the day warmed up the fish became more active and the river that seemingly earlier had no fish suddenly came alive. I landed 4 good fish up to 5lb in quick succession some on nymphs and couple on Pheasant Tail emergers.I decided to turn around about 3pm as I wanted to check out tomorrows river. I wasn't to sure of its public access points as some of it is accessed through private farmland where permission is required by the Station owner, I had heard the fishing on this stream was excellent and wanted to get there early the next day to avoid being beaten by other anglers. A 30min drive saw me reach the river where I followed my nose down a couple of dirt roads and 4wd tracks to river.A quick scout upstream to a couple of deep holes revealed 2 very happy brown trout gently swaying in the current and feeding happily, I decided to leave them be as it was getting on in the day and I was ready for dinner and a cold beer.Day 1 of my day exploration trip had been a great success and I couldn't wait to see what tomorrow would bring.