On Monday night TRM was booked out again so it was a good opportunity to provide a brief survey of fishing results. For some strange reason anglers always find these surveys fascinating. It is safe to post such results as the situation changes from day to day with the spawning runs following the weather pattern. Do not rely on the images from TRM library as any guide – they are just to tease you. OK?

Out of 11 units TRM had 3 non-fishing guests filling the gaps. The following results are from 14 anglers spread over nine units to compare.  The point of all this is to explain that from this wider cross-section of results – success or otherwise, TRM anglers can enjoy a clear advantage of using others to do their research every day.  For obvious reasons the results are usually confidential to inmates “in-house” but now the school holiday crowding is over, this is a brief update of how difficult it can be finding the “hot” spot.  

Yesterday was like today, the weather was beautiful, a fine, bright, sunny day, about 15 c in the sun, no breeze – very welcome after a week of overcast wet difficult conditions.  That weather improvement usually happens after school holidays.  Over the school holiday fortnight some anglers struggled while others caught their limit.   The biggest challenge was finding undisturbed pools. The better known pools suffered from crowding. Some parts of the lower and upper river were very consistent, other parts struggled.  Typical.

There are a lot of factors to take into account with any such survey. On Monday, yesterday, the river level was still going down to about 37 cumecs.   All inmates, except for me, (I am still learning) could be described as experienced. All had fished the Tongariro many times previously and knew their way around the pools, so the wide variance between them was surprising. Some moved around a lot while others restricted their efforts to one part of the river only. Some older fossils (me?) only fished one spot.

The target pools or runs were very spread from well downriver beyond Reed Pool to well upriver beyond Boulder Reach. We could expand this to also comment on wet line trawling v’s floating line nymphing, or to provide which flies were working, but this is just to provide a brief taste of the catch rates which varied considerably as follows:

Unit 1 -1 angler – nil
Unit 2 – traveller
Unit 3 – 2 anglers landed 17 lost as many again.
Unit 4 – 3 anglers – lost one.
Unit 5  – 2 anglers – nil
Unit 6 – 1 angler – nil
Unit 7 – Travel writer
Unit 8 – 1 angler – nil
Unit 9 – casual tourist
Unit 10 – 1 angler landed 5, fishos opposite also landed more than 5.
Unit 11 – 2 anglers – one keeper with a couple released.
Unit 12 – (Me) nil.  Then the need for better analysis gets serious…

The catch rate variance – between nil to 17 with only 3 anglers out of 13 enjoying any real success was still surprising.  The key issue is to determine what type of flies Unit 3 & 10 were using and where?  Sorry, you will have to stay at TRM for that.  As they are here until the end of the week we daren’t reveal the key to their success…  

But we will provide a clue… If you see a team of “lucky” TRM hats congregating in any particular run or pool or reach then they may be benefitting from special “inside” information? Most importantly then, keep it to yourself. It would be unfortunate to see such overlooked productive hot spots turn into another Bridge Pool combat casting clinic.