I friend of mine sent me a video about fly fishing in Patagonia. This brought back a flood of memories, especially of a trip I took with some American friends to a little known river that empties into Lago Todos los Santos (All Saints Lake) in southern Chile – both Chile and Argentina have a Patagonia. That was the best fly fishing trip of my life and the irony was that the biggest fish I caught was using an old fiberglass rod with a beat up Abu Garcia reel and a faded Rapala shad I had hidden in the boat – a relic of my years of bass fishing in Lake Travis. One morning in which all my friends had gone upriver to drift downstream using floats ‒ kind of a fancy inner tube that you get in with your waders and propel yourself using flippers ‒ and having nothing better to do, plus nobody looking (fly fishermen frown on artificial lures and bait casting reels), I got out my trusty ol’ $5 dollar pawn-shop-bought Shakespere Ugly Stik and went to work. My first cast was into a small waterfall on the side of the slew we were in. Covered in huge ferns and having a ten foot drop it looked exotic and promising. I remember a woodpecker making a big racket in the overhanging trees while I absentmindedly let the lure tumble as it may into the partly shaded foam and bubbles below, then . . . an explosion and . . . focus! The ferocity of the brown trout was nothing short of breathtaking, astonishing is not a large word for those beasts that were like nothing I had ever seen, much less experienced. I let out a Whooop! that broke all fishing protocols, fly, bait casting, whatever, but could not be helped. I even wondered if swimming in the lake was safe. Basically, they were salt water predators in disguise and on the prowl ‒ that would literally go for anything.
I have since graduated to fly fishing 100%, mostly using dry flies and don’t carry nearly all the equipment these guys in the video lug around. Just some shades and a hat with a few woolly buggers stuck in it, both black and brown, and maybe half a dozen assorted dry flies. And yes, a couple of cheap cigars in my shirt pocket, along with two or three replacement leaders and some nails clippers next to my pocket knife and a Zippo. On my back rests a small backpack with a windbreaker and dry socks, a sandwich in case of emergency, some cheese . . .