I probably didn’t pick the best possible period in Canterbury’s long history of salmon fishing to try for my first salmon.
Often called the ‘king of fish’, chinook salmon – or quinnat, to give them their Kiwi name – have run the major rivers of Canterbury and Otago for over 100 years. New Zealand boasts the only successful establishment of an ocean-going, self-sustaining population of Pacific salmon in the world.
But New Zealand’s salmon fishery has fallen on hard times in recent years. The size and quality of the run has always fluctuated from year to year, the result of variable conditions at sea, but the last few years have seen a catastrophic drop in the number of salmon returning to the rivers of their birth to breed.
It seems highly likely that environmental factors have impacted negatively on salmon numbers. They’ve impacted negatively in other ways, too. Several years of poor salmon returns have whittled down the number of Canterbury’s salmon anglers to a fanatical few. Licence sales are down and even the faithful have endured several seasons without a fish in many cases.
This year though, an improved run has seen renewed angler interest, especially when word gets out through the angler grapevine that the salmon are running. Most of Canterbury’s better known salmon rivers have experienced a few days here and there where good numbers of salmon were taken – success is simply a matter of striking the right river mouth on the right day.
So it was with at least a small measure of confidence that Adam Clancey and I joined Christchurch tackle-store owner and salmon specialist Malcolm Bell for a couple of days of rivermouth surf fishing in mid-February. Malcolm had already bagged a few salmon for the season – in fact he’d managed fish every season, even during the particularly hard years.
We followed Malcolm in pre-dawn darkness to the northern side of the Rakaia River, our chosen venue on the day, based on reports of a run of fish the weekend before. Malcolm’s Suzuki Vitara has been tricked up to tackle the shingle bars typical of Canterbury’s braided rivers, but Adam felt his Jeep Cherokee, also raised and sporting oversize tyres, would be up to the job, so we engaged 4WD Low and followed Malcolm onto the deep gravel of the beach, running in his tyre tracks for several kilometres to the river mouth.
The position of the rivermouth – as with most rivermouths along this coast, we were told – changes regularly. At present, it is a long way from the road end on the northern side, but an easy walk on the south side.
Conditions were good when we arrived. There was a low swell and the sea was relatively clean – good, Malcolm told us. The rip formed by the river’s current was curling round with the tide, forming a nice back-eddy of clear, reasonably deep water on our side of the river – also good, said Malcolm.
Best of all, gulls wheeled and dived overhead, the surf deposited rippling piles of small silver fish onto the gravel at our feet, and the water was obviously full of fish. Anglers on both sides of the river were pulling out a succession of fat South Island kahawai. We hoped a few salmon accompanied them.
Malcolm and some of the more seasoned anglers amongst the crowd at the rivermouth were equipped with specialised, low-mount casting rods. These rigs have been developed to provide long casts, which often mean the difference between salmon success and failure.
Small overhead reels (typically by ABU, Daiwa or Shimano) are mounted low on four- to five-metre rods, the spools controlled by the thumb of the left hand. The right hand is positioned well up the rod, acting as pivot, power and control for the cast.
Malcolm can belt out 120m-plus casts all day long with his rig. It’s lightweight – the English-made, high-modulus graphite carp rod weighs just a few hundred grams – and his Daiwa Sealine-X 30HV reel, loaded with fused superbraid line, is also relatively lightweight. He removes the reels centrifugal cast control and uses special oil in the bearings, re-oiling the reel before each expedition.
Apart from being able to cast a long way, the low-mount system has the advantage of being more comfortable to use over a long day’s casting and retrieving. Light in weight and with the reel low down on the rod means the butt can be tucked into the groin or belly so the reel handle falls nicely to hand for the retrieve.
I had no such fancy tackle; nor did I have any of the hand-polished Ticers Malcolm was using. Instead, a conventional surf-fishing rig and a handful of Black Magic jigs allowed me to get in amongst the fishing.
Long casts are not always a pre-requisite for success; many of the other anglers, on both banks, were using conventional surf tackle or shorter ‘upriver’ rods to fish the near-shore surf, the river current and the gut just back from the mouth. After donating a few jigs to the ocean on over-enthusiastic casts, I decided this tactic might suit me better.
On our side of the river, several long casters covered the best-looking water out wide, while I joined a gaggle of short-rod fishers nearer the river outflow. I was soon into fish – fat kahawai, which gave the spin gear I was using (actually my soft soft-plastics set-up loaded with 4kg superbraid) quite a workout in the surf and heavy current.
I quickly figured out that the best tactic involved casting out and across the current, letting the lure sink for a few moments, then closing the bail and allowing the lure to swing across the current. At times it was a fish every cast – but no salmon. I began to realise why Ticers are so popular, too – the flash paint job on my jigs was chipped off in no time by contact with the shingle on the beach, leaving me with a dull, grey, metal slug.
After a few kahawai on conventional jigs, I changed to soft plastics, which worked just as well. But still no salmon. In fact, no one was getting any salmon on our bank. Then, about mid-morning, we spotted some commotion on the south side of the mouth. An angler fishing into the river proper, just up from the mouth, had hooked and proceeded to land what looked like a nice-sized salmon, the last, we were told later, of three landed from the south side that morning.
It was decision time. Malcolm suggested we pack up our gear and make the long trek back to the southern side of the river. The tide had turned, our eddy was no more, and we’d seen a salmon landed from the other bank.
An hour and a half later we were tackling up on the other bank. Malcolm waded out onto the spit to fish the clear patch to the right of the river current, while Adam and I shouldered our way between anglers for a go at the close-in water.
Kahawai continued to crash baitfish, boiling on the surface where the river water merged with the ocean waves. Often fish would propel themselves out of the waves onto hapless shoals of silveries trapped in the roiling waters where river and sea mixed. Most were kahawai, but some were obviously trout – big ones.
Trout were also evident in the tidal stretch immediately above the mouth. Sea-run brown trout are a feature of all these rivermouths and have been a popular diversion for local anglers during recent years of poor salmon runs.
Many are caught on the same gear used for salmon, but serious sea-trout anglers use Canterbury lure rods – heavy flyrods equipped with large flyreels or Daiwa mooching reels, heavy nylon running line, a weight and a streamer fly or flies. Line is stripped off the reel before the weight and flies are lobbed into the river’s flow and allowed to swing. It sounds a bit crude, but works remarkably well. Big sea-runs, and they regularly attain weights in excess of 5kg, are almost as good to eat as salmon.
A little weary with catching kahawai, I decided to try for sea-run trout using my 6-weight flyrod and a fast-sinking, shooting-head line. I hoped to swing the fly past one or more of the fish I could see rising in the main flow of the river.
As it turned out, sea-trout ignored my offerings, but not long after starting fishing I hooked what turned out to be a 1.5kg rainbow trout – by all accounts an unusual catch so close to the rivermouth.
I released that fish and decided to move right into the mouth to try for those big trout I could occasionally see. On my very first cast I hooked a gigantic kahawai that proceeded to all but spool me. I finally beached it after a twenty-minute tug of war in the surf and river current – and decided to put the flyrod away. What would happen if I by chance hooked a salmon?
After a slowish patch, the fishing picked up again later in the day. An angler on the north bank (typical) hooked an obviously heavy fish on an upriver rod that took him to the cleaners. It appeared to make a long powerful run downstream, but he broke it off by trying to turn it rather than following it. We could tell he was furious with himself, convinced he’d hooked a salmon.
A few good sea trout began to come to the bank. A couple of lure rod fishers had some success on the other side of the river, fishing inside the mouth, so Malcolm broke out his lure rod for a change of pace.
After only a few casts he hooked a good fish right out of the river mouth along the edge of the current, which turned out to be 3.5kg sea-run brown. It was a beautifully fat, silvery fish that supplied the Bell family with two delicious meals.
Adam and I then took turns with the lure rod, but succeeded only in hooking kahawai – you can take a North Islander out of the North Island but you can’t take the North Island out of a North Islander!
To add insult to injury, the angler standing next to me – a retired dairy farmer from Taranaki – hooked and landed a 5kg sea-trout on a huge Ticer, which I swear he cast no more than 10m!
It was time to call it quits. A three-salmon day on the Rakaia is better than some, but not good enough to warrant another visit. The following day we’d try the Hurunui to the north. By all accounts, 15 salmon were taken there.
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This article is reproduced with permission of
New Zealand Fishing News
Nov 2007 - by John Eichelsmheim
RE-PUBLISHING ELSEWHERE IS PROHIBITED |
