This may be hard to believe…

I have discovered I own a most unusual trout-sensitive cell phone. Every time I try to take a photo of an angler casting and drifting on the Tongariro River, I am astonished when they have immediate success and get hooked up. This is true!

Initially, I thought it must be just a coincidence but now it has happened so often I am convinced that Apple has programmed it or incorporated a new special TRM “ap”.

There is more to the story than that. This never happened before until I almost drowned (flung in when our water-strider raft was flipped by a pressure wave) with the phone frantically paddling underwater for about 30 metres. After that mishap, a misty bubble appeared on the screen. It took about a month of resuscitation in the dry warmth of the hot water cupboard for the bubble to disappear. Only after that did it start to perform wonder hook-ups for Tongariro River anglers. Quite uncanny really – only on the Tongariro River. It has not repeated the success on other Lake Taupo tribs. I am not certain if the phone still works, I never receive any calls (maybe because the ringing noise is turned off?) but the camera is fantastic.

Then another angler confirmed it must be really special by offering to buy my iPhone after he had witnessed how well it works. I recognised his sneaky intention was commercially driven – to charge anglers before he took their photos. But we need to be fair and offer it to the highest bidder with all proceeds going to Didymo Dave’s anti-weed anti-pest anti-didymo biosecurity training programme. With this “ap” I reckon it has to be worth at least a couple of $thousand…

For the few phone calls I make, I might as well replace the iPhone with this earlier model that I grew up with. This Ericsson model was originally installed at SWMBO’s family farm. We never needed facebook as any juicy local gossip was shared surreptitiously on the party line. It is not as portable and does not take photos, but if it fell in the river it has the advantage it might float!

But then sometimes, fortuitously, cell phones can spring surprising results. I recall a few years ago when I managed to bog TRM’s vehicle in soft sand at the mouth of the Waiotaka River and needed to phone for a tow. When I could not decipher how to call on the cell phone, in desperation, I wandered along to the yacht club car park to look for a ten-year-old who would be sure to know. Instead I came across this older, more mature tourist who explained how to phone, despite some language difficulty as she could only explain in her French language. Sadly, I was so distracted by nature that I did not take it all in, but my French language skills improved remarkably.