May - Christchurch Fishing and Casting Club

Both Lakes Arapuni and Karapiro continue to produce high catch rates of large fish. The
cool summer and high flows have produced excellent growth rates, and we are getting a
lot of positive feedback from anglers. It would be at least 10 years since the hydro lakes
fished this well.
The small stream fishing continues to be outstanding, partly because it was such a wet
summer that we are still seeing good flows – despite the recent long period of dry
weather. Streams along the Kaimai Ranges and the headwaters of the Waipa are holding
large numbers of trout, including big browns that have recently moved in from the lower
reaches.
Further south, it can be difficult to fish the gorge sections of the Whakapapa and upper
Whanganui due to the low angle of the sun shading much of the river and making it hard
to spot fish or even to read the water. Over summer we’ve received mixed reports from
both rivers. Fishing success appears to vary considerably day-by-day, and with the
expertise of the angler.
AT THE END ARE THE RAINBOWS
Hugh Creasy
There’s a fold in the hills, a twist of rock and clay where grass grows greener and
griselina grows untouched by grazing animals. And at the foot of an old hoheria,
bedraggled in the autumn, with half its leaves gone, there is a bog where sedges push
aside the grass and a trickle of brown water falls to a narrow valley, a gorge. It is the
beginning of a river – its source.
A few venturesome sheep have left their hoofmarks in the bog, but for the most part the
steepness of the surrounding countryside keeps larger animals at bay. This is the grazing
ground of hares, the habitat of skinks and geckos, sunbathing on the boulders. The
mayflies and caddis rise from the gorge to rest on the rock faces and become sustenance
for predators.
There are soldier flies and hairy-headed moth midges where a tangle of fallen tree trunks
has blocked the gorge. The decaying organic matter feeds them for all the years it takes
trees to disintegrate and disappear. The water here seeps rather than flows, and where the
gorge ends and the stream becomes defined there are patches of gorse and broom where
mallards have molted and left their feathers strewn. In the stream, where the first pool is
shaded, a giant kokopu hovers in the mud, its presence revealed by a waving dorsal fin.
At the foot of the pool, smaller galaxids keep station, each with an invisible territory, a
living space to graze and hunt.
Below the pool the corpse of a ewe, dead during lambing in the spring, is now a hollow
shell of bedraggled leather and wool, home to dronefly maggots, ready to pupate. The
corpse has been visited by eels and all soft tissue has long gone but the carcass has
released a rich diet to the stream’s wildlife.
19