Kindly Provided by Southland Fly Fishing Club.

What a great month February has been for the angler, sunny bright blue skies, little to no wind and reasonable river flows providing conditions that suited all angling styles. Night fishing with mouse imitations has been a topic on many anglers’ lips especially on lakes in the Te Anau basin area. I have been shown a number of images showing some very impressive double figure trout caught around midnight on mouse imitations.

My months angling was limited mostly to Stillwater with beetles after dusk, and exploration of a small weedy creek that looked more like a dirty farm ditch when viewed from the road. After many years of driving over this minor creek and saying I must see if any trout are lurking there, I finally took the bait and spent about an hour with a small black humpy. Well the old adage of don't rush to the headwaters until you have fished the lowlands proved correct with six very nicely conditioned browns of about 1kg making it worth while. The creek weed covered about two thirds of the water leaving only a small clear section of flow down the centre line. It was a case of standing in the centre of the creek to be able to directly place the fly upstream so that the drift was even while stripping line. The fish holding under the edge of the weed just drifted out in a lazy way, rose and gulped down the fly. Simple as that, so of course I will return to look a bit harder for the larger specimens that I recon must be there.

On being fortunate to be presented with a selection of John Day’s last months Cicada by the man himself, I decided to try it out on trout cruising the edge of Lake Dunstan where there was a lot of edge vegetation. Although there were no Cicada’s on the water that I could see, I placed one of John's #8 creations in front of a trout cruising the shallows about three metres out. Without any hesitation whatsoever the fly was taken, and it was all on with a very nice feisty rainbow. After release, I was out of time so there the experiment ended. However, my buddy and I will soon be having two days in the Hunter where Cicadas will be all over the place so; John's patterns will be given the time and action they deserve.

For those of you that spend time fishing the Mataura, this months fly by Les Ladbrook, editor of the Southland Fly Fishing Club Newsletter will be a real winner being very simple to tie and effective.

May the rise be with you. Quick Draw

Emerger

Kindly Provided by Les Ladbrook of the Southland Fly Fishing Club

During the "Mad Mataura Rise", fish are often taking food just under the surface, or just in it, what they are actually taking is hard to predict exactly.

Often a well placed emerger will do the trick (but not always, one night is works perfectly, and the next you don’t seem to be able to get a hook up).

The secret while the fish are in this mood is to quickly place a fly approximately 0.5m upstream of them and directly in front, therein lies the problem.

Because these fish are slowly moving upstream as they feed, they are also moving from side to side, quite often a considerable distance. So within 5 seconds of their last rise, they can be a metre away from where they last rose in any direction. This means you can put up anywhere from 5-105 casts to a single fish, and 10% of them will be in the right place, but with so much food, your fly can be missed buy a couple of centimetres.

This exercise often takes place near or during dusk, and these flies often cannot be seen, one way around this problem is to tie a small dry fly that you can see in the conditions, then off the bend of the hook tie an emerger on a dropper about 10-15 cm long. If you can see the fly, you get a better idea if you are getting your cast in the right place while also working as an indicator. I have used this method to good effect during the day on some occasions.

Each time you catch a fish on a CDC emerger, it is often best to replace your fly with a new one that will float, because the slime from the fish will often make it sink, which at times just being under the surface can be a benefit. The value of such a simple pattern in my view is that you can quickly tie up a good supply and replace for each fish you catch, leaving the cleaning and drying for the next day.