Today was a Character Builder

An eel

Skinny water.

Going up!

Today we were fishing a river recommended by an acquaintance. The river is called the Borland Burn.  Karen and I arrived at our starting spot and we loaded up our fly fishing gear and lunches and started to hike. The hike to the river was straight down, way down. Hey we're fit, no worries. Well we finally got to our river and it was a mere trickle. We did encounter a four foot eel as we explored. We were hoping for some big browns in some pools that were hard to get to. Well after lots of walking, slipping and crashing we abandoned our river. You know what that meant, straight back up the wall we slide down. We arrived at the van drenched in sweat and headed to the Whitestone river. You have to remember that the firordlands have had 2 mm of rain in the last 5 weeks. I think it's a 60 year low for rainfall in the last month. The rivers are low, real low. The second river we fished was again way too low to fish and finally we found some nice water to fish on a third river. The Mokorea river looked good for water levels but had two back hoes working in the river for some unknown reason so we had to get above all of this commotion.We finally started to fish at 4 pm even though we started our fishing day at 9 am. We found some small rainbows and little else. The wind was whistling and it was another long walk back to the van. We got back to our camp site. We were all grumbling. Yes, today was a character builder. Maybe we should have taken a boat ride. Not yet, we hope to find that big brown tomorrow.

...hope is eternal

Bob