The Tauranga-Taupo - fishing for trout

The Tauranga Taupo river near Taupo can provide outstanding fishing. At different times during the year and depending on the weather and river conditions the fish may not hold for long in the pools and it is a matter of finding which pool they are in. When you do, you are in for some exciting fishing.

One of the best ways of finding the fish in this river is to walk straight up to the Cliff Pool and then to nymph downstream until you find the pocket of running fish. However this is not ‘downstream nymphing’ where you fish with a sinking line. Instead fish with a floating line.

The idea is to start at the top of a pool or reach and cast your nymph across to the far bank. Best choices of flies would be Muppets and Glo Bugs with small Hare’n’Copper beadheads as the tail flies .Walk your nymph downstream matching the speed of the current. Because the footing is all even shingle and not slippery, you can very easily walk your nymph down the length of the pool. If, at any stage, you get some drag occurring, just recast and resume your walk.

In this way you can fish through an entire pool in a few minutes. If you find fish in the pool, retreat to the tail of the pool and slowly work your way up, nymphing upstream in the customary manner.

If you have no strikes on the way down through the pool, you can fairly safely assume there are no ‘schools’ of fish in that particular pool. You can then wade across the tail and start working your way down the next pool or run.

When you finally start to strike fish, stay in that pool until the fishing goes ‘off’ meaning that the fish have probably moved onto the next pool up.

Contrary to what you expect, you will not scare the fish as the TT rainbows all tend to hide in holes under the blackberry on the far bank and so are quite insulated from your quiet stroll downstream.

The other advantage of fishing down is that you can wade deeper as you are not trying to fight the current as you would have to when working up the river. This enables you to cast a shorter line and have it more under control as you steer it under or around the projections on the far bank.

Of course when you encounter an angler working his way upstream, you must exit the water immediately and then resume downstream of the nympher. Most anglers are quite happy for you to share the pool as long as you get in behind the upward moving nympher. You won’t be bothering them for long if you find no fish in the pool.

This technique is a lot more successful than just fishing one pool all day and waiting for the fish to come through.

The Tauranga Taupo is a little unique in that studies with radio transmitters on running fish have shown that the rainbows here tend to move up the river in batches or schools. If you can find a school of the running fish in a pool, you are in for busy day. I have often hooked over a dozen fish in a day using this ‘fishfinding’ technique.

It was passed onto me years ago by a very helpful angler from Hamilton. He fished the TT every weekend from May through to September and always astounded other anglers with the numbers of fish that he caught. The simple reason was that he found the fish first and then got amongst them.

His flybox was filled with large heavy Muppets and he used size 12 Pheasant Tail nymphs for his tail fly. He reckoned that if you were not losing a nymph regularly, you were not getting close enough to the blackberry and the sheltering fish. He insisted that you had to put the fly over the nose of the fish to get any interest.

I found his flies a bit heavy, especially when the water was low and preferred to use a beadhead Hare’n’Copper for the sinker and a multi-coloured (orange/red/champagne) small egg fly for the tail fly.

On rivers where you can walk your nymph downstream, this is a great way of covering a lot of water. Not so great on the Tongariro where the first slippery cannonball would have you taking a swim. But try it out next time you are on the TT – I’m sure you will be amazed just what a ‘fishfinder’ it is.