For our eighth week at Kau Tapen we welcomed the legendary group (Dick S. group) that has been coming at Kau Tapen since the beginning of the lodge. This trip for them at Kau Tapen is a must and they always enjoy their time here. Most of them are from United States of America and two of them from United Kingdom.
This group always come to enjoy the experience of being here and as you can guess they have plenty of stories about the lodge, how it started and their first sea run brown trout. It’s delightful to hear their stories and not only about the amazing Rio Grande but also on their fishing adventures in Russia, Canada, Iceland… They have been fishing at Kau Tapen for more than 20 years, and have their habits, their favourite pools and flies. It was great to share this week with this group. They are kinder than ever and are now more relaxed about the fishing and come more here to have a great time between friends, and catch a couple of nice fish as well.
The weather is quite cold for this time of the year, and the water temperature dropped to 6°C in the morning, reaching 8-9 °C in the afternoon. The summer seems to be gone and autumn is definitely here with some touches of early winter! We had some very cold nights with ice on the river bank and even forming on the rod holders at the end of some evening sessions! Due to this very cold weather and difficult fishing our guests spent some time in the river and sometimes stayed at the lodge. The lodge itself is such a nice place to be. They caught have already so many sea trout that they were chilling at the lodge when the weather was not so nice. They are not here to compete with each other or other anglers, or to make records but just to be at Kau Tapen Lodge and go out to enjoy themselves. They know they can catch some very big trout and become a part of history, one of the reasons they also come back every year since their first try. The Rio Grande is without any doubt the best sea trout fishery in the world in term of numbers, sizes and quality/healthy fish!
With these conditions, we had to adapt ourselves to every little change and find the right rigging. We started to fish with leeches even during the daytime as the cold water put the fish down at the bottom and we had to present the fly close with a rather slow swing. We used floating to intermediate lines with slow to very fast sink tips rigged with chartreuse or a black and silver leech. The buggers were working as well when the water temperature was a bit higher. The rigging of the week was without doubt the black and silver leech, on a Tip 4 sink tip with slow retrieve.
As usual our guests got some very nice fish with 3 fish over 20 pounds for 3 different guests and some nice fish between 10 to 20 pounds. Our top rod Chris caught a fair amount of fish going out every session and staying till dark, and got also one of the 20 pounders, biggest fish of the week. Well done Chris!
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