At the End of the World, the Fish Stories Come True
Although it holds the world's biggest population of large trout, the Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego was rarely fished as recently as 40 years ago. Sea trout, the descendants of brown trout placed in the river in the 1930's, thrived in the Antarctic Sea and returned to the Rio Grande every year in ever-increasing numbers and sizes. Ten pounds was the average, and tales of 20-pounders raised eyebrows at first, but the photographic evidence of anglers holding impressive trout could not be dismissed in that pre-Photoshop era.
Two years ago, on my first visit to the place that travel brochures not unreasonably call 'the land at the end of the world,' I caught a half-dozen fish that weighed 20 pounds apiece, and they have inhabited my dreams ever since. I returned this year with my daughter, Lucy, at the invitation of Jose Calvo Garcia, an old friend whose nickname is Buby and who has helped more than anyone else to explore and popularize this extraordinary fishery.
The eastern part of the timeless, wind-swept landscape is a succession of sere hills marching across a hundred miles of scrub land to snow-capped mountains in the West. Apart from small herds of llama-like guanacos, the land is given over to flocks of sheep, tended by gauchos on horseback trailed by packs of the spirited sheepdogs who are their ever-present workmates.
We set up headquarters at Aurelia Lodge, a comfortable ranch-turned-fishing camp. Well before our arrival, I used the Internet to track the weather and the fishing, pointing and clicking a dozen times a day trying to separate the truth from wishful thinking. By most accounts, a large cohort of fish had entered from the ocean in November. Meanwhile, the run-off from the mountains had abated so that the river ran low and clear. Conditions should have been prime, but a week before we arrived a freak storm dumped a half year's worth of rain on the area. Many fish took advantage of the high water to continue their spawning journey farther upstream while new fish had yet to arrive from the ocean to take their place. Pickings were slim.
Still, when you come this far to fish, you fish. On our first session, Lucy and I each landed a 12-pound trout, and Lucy hooked another fish that was considerably larger. Startled by the size of this catch, she was unable to come tight quickly enough and the huge trout escaped, speeding across the stream. In the following days, Lucy and I each hooked more than a dozen of the silver-sided trout. However, neither of us could master the restrained but forceful strike necessary for a secure hook-up. When these fish take, it is so exciting that you tend to rear back too quickly.
We were bedeviled, but much luckier than the rest of our group who barely managed a hook-up. Buby, the most experienced of us all, was shut out, but he took it with the equipoise that is his way. With his ageless hound's-tooth, snap-brimmed hat and his six-weight rod (not the brutish two-handed Spey rods that many anglers feel they need to handle the gale winds pushing up from the South Pole), Buby has a style that is as laid back as a Hoagy Carmichael tune. As we returned from the river each evening and sat down to supper at midnight (not particularly late in Argentina) he would say, by way of benediction: 'Well, we must hope that tomorrow will be better. I am sure we will catch a fish.'
But as things turned out, Lucy and I kept hooking up and not landing fish, while the rest of our gang kept taking the collar. We couldn't explain it. Weeks after my return, I was awakened one night when the answer hit me. It was all about our leaders. At the suggestion of our guide, Luis Olivier, Lucy and I fished 14-foot leaders and size-12 flies. The others in our group were fishing 7-foot leaders with bigger flies. That had to be the difference, even though it has always been my experience that long leaders are for dry flies on quiet water; with wet flies, leader length is not an issue. 'Now you tell me,' a friend of mine remonstrated when I called last week to tell him of my revelation.
Putting our 'bad luck' in perspective, few anglers ever get to catch even one 12-pound trout in a lifetime. Fewer still have the chance to hook, and lose, fish twice that size, especially in the midst of such grand vistas. Nor do fathers and grown daughters often get the chance to spend a week fishing together. I thought of this on our last night, as golden fingers of sunlight poured down on the jagged white peaks of the southernmost Andes.
Flocks of Magellan geese called through the calm air of twilight, their wings lit from below with the rosy light of alpenglow. For a moment, it almost didn't matter that we had not caught more fish.
Mind you, I said 'almost.' The moment passed, and as far as I'm concerned, Lucy and I have a score to settle with the trout of Tierra del Fuego.
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