Our second day at Casa de Campo Lodge found us fly fishing the Rio Calfiquitra with SET Fly Fishing. I hope you were able to read last week’s Fish Hunting at Casa de Campo post and our first day fishing in Argentina.
Our destination today was Lanin National Park. On the way to Rio Calfiquitra, we drove through a forest of monkeypod trees. What a unique and fascinating tree!
Here we are setting up rods for the day…Gonzolo on the left and Birdy on the right. It feels strange to me for someone else to string up our rods and tie flies onto tippet because we don’t use guides. But in Patagonia, it’s different.
It’s always an adventure walking to new water, but Birdy was a little creative with Gonzolo looking on wondering what in the world is he doing???
Once we arrived at the water, we found a slow, meandering river, shallow in some areas and quite easy to wade across. I know we are close to the border with Chile. Perhaps some of those mountains in the distance are in Chile.
It wasn’t long before I hooked and landed my first fish.
OK, I was hoping for something a little bigger, but at least it was a start. Turns out I landed a few of these who willingly rose to my fly in this run.
Dancingtrout on the other hand started the day a little better day.
She was casting by the overhanging branches and found this beautiful trout.
I found a good looking run and hoped there was a fish along the grasses. See the dark blue slot next to the grasses? Yes, there was a nice Brown that rose to my fly, but I wasn’t able to keep it hooked.
And then another hookup for Dancingtrout.
Look at the colors of this Rainbow! It’s the same one as the first image on today’s post.
As the morning progressed, the air temperatures rose and we saw an occasional ring of a fish rising to eat on the surface. We would slowly approach the area to see if we could spot the fish and cast to it, but they didn’t rise that often.
After lunch, we moved upstream and Birdy spotted more fish swimming in the slow water for us to cast.
At one of the holes we fished, a flock of parakeets flew by and I was able to snap a few images. This is the best I could do.
Birdy changed flies a lot, especially the dropper. But this Beetle caught some fish.
It was technical fishing. Birdy spots a fish and we cast, hoping the trout would swim to and eat the fly. Several fish swam to our fly, paused to give it a quick look, and slowly swam away. We marveled at this as we didn’t believe the fish were pressured at all, but they showed signs of being very picky trout.
Dancingtrout landed some nice trout that day from slow moving water like this.
Here is another of hers.
Can you tell the difference between branches and reflection in the image below? Are they touching the water or can I drift a fly under the branches? It was difficult to tell. There wasn’t room behind me to back cast and I was able to get a lucky roll cast to the far bank and let my fly drift under the bushes. But no fish were seen.
We rose some big trout in these waters and of course the big one broke off! It’s what keeps us returning to the water.
Enjoy…go fish!
