NZ 34 – Australia 17…. Whew. We can all relax again. What a great tournament.
Crafty Hanover described himself as a novice angler from Taranaki who usually fishes another little Taupo tributary called the Waitahanui.
As his son Trev from Melbourne and a few other angler brethren were staying at TRM he joined them to partake in their special early Sunday morning service – aka footy contest.. The Taranaki team spread out between two of TRM’s largest units and numbered about nine or ten or more, I think?, plus a few other over-stayers coming and going. Anyway, on Saturday afternoon everyone was raving about hundreds of trout easily visible waiting for anglers below the Major Jones Pool but they were proving difficult to catch as they were distracted by the other activity in the big spawning redds and not really interested in eating. That was until Crafty arrived…
Crafty always studies TRM Daily Report and had seen the inmate’s story about how successful the woolly buggers were on Canadian salmon – see Daily Report last Friday.
http://www.tongarirorivermotel.co.nz/daily-report/page/2/
So Crafty went over to the dark side and tied on a traditional TRM ubiquitous olive woolly bugger to prove how ‘deadly’ they really are. By the time I caught up with him later on Saturday afternoon, his trout had grown to 7 pound+. It was easily the largest from his team for the weekend, already cleaned and in the smoker in preparation for the footy. By now it will probably have grown to at least ten pound. So we can only show you Crafty’s woolly bugger instead.
I was so nervous about the footy that I had to abandon the laundry while I went biking up the Tongariro to relax beside the beautiful Kamahi Pool. I needed to check on any changes for you, where it tumbles down into the Never Fail Pool – photo on right.
Soon after a delightful tourist couple from Holland joined me. Jan Doorn was doing the hard part – sun bathing and reading on the bank – while husband Jos did the fishing — again wet lining with a big woolly bugger.
They are visiting “New” Zealand from “old” Zeeland. Confused? I welcomed the tourists into the delightful Kamahi Pool – plenty of trout visible there too – while I retired back to TRM instead and hid in the laundry…
We were thrilled that Jos soon landed his first Tongariro trout – a three and a half pound Rainbow followed by another soon after.
Such tourists are now so important to NZ that SWMBO maintains we should offer them more incentives to visit NZ – like free fishing licences? (instead of charging a premium!) Perhaps as well as changing the flag SWMBO thinks it is an appropriate time to change the name too. They changed Van Diemans land but ‘New Zealand’ remained unchanged? SWMBO suggests Tongariro is such a nice name… And change the National Anthem too. And change the Government system too. TRM anglers are still confused how the Government can break the law on trout farming which proves some things needs changing. Or everything?
