After a long period of dry days, Dunedin has been wet since a week ago.
This is the graph of my sight fishing river flow.The river water has finally risen close to the median level, the river I mainly fished from mid October to early December. And I stopped fishing here in mid Dec.
Because the river water had been lower than minimum flow ever since.
Usually, freestone rivers go turbid just after the rise and it is considerable to watch the water colour or worth waiting for a few days. But I know that this river water hardly get turbid even after the rain, have never seen the water badly discoloured.
Then, I felt like going back to the river for the first time in new year hoping some fresh sea run fish which have yet to get heavy angling pressure are running up the river.
It was a kind of chilly day for February and the weather was quite changeable, sunny, cloudy, showers...
The river was quiet through the day. At the first spot I tried, I did not see any fish rising or jumpimg, just saw few fish under water. My only chance was that a brown took a dropper nymph underneath the dry but unsuccessful hooking.
And then, I moved to the second piece of the river but still couldn't spot any fish because of the windy condition. Even between the winds, I saw nothing along weed beds where I usually spot cruising fish. I thought I was unable to catch anything. Maybe, the river water was too new and cold or the low air temperature kept fish stay down deep, something...
But I noticed that a fish jumped a bit downstream I was fishing and it sounded like a big fish's splash. I just walked down quickly and stalked for the fish.
" Where is he or she? I'm sure I heard it jumped and saw the ripple."
And I found a big one just below my feet.
As soon as I presented my dry & dropper nymph rig, it slowly moved away from my fly along the weed bed. Then, I made the second cast about 6 feet ahead of the fish.
And it headed toward the fly, and......., took it!! the dropper nymph!
Caught it! Nice 5lb jack, 24inches in length.
This is probably a sea run brown with blue-greyish colour.
Uhhh, such a nice fish. Bye!
And I caught one more fish an hour later.
3lb, 21inches jack.
This is definitely a sea run which doesn't have any warm tones of yellow, orange or red that resident browns normally have for their colour. Just silver-grey with a blueish tone.
Thank you for making me happy!
While fighting with the first fish, another brown of the same size was chasing the fish on my fly and after I landed the second fish, I saw another good one jumped, so I should come back here again, hopefully have a few more chance to catch nice ones.
