Reel Life November 2022

Summer is almost here in Hawkes Bay!

The cicadas are just beginning to sound off and rivers are steadily dropping by the week, between intermittent rain. Most tributaries have been fishable throughout the entire month providing good fishing to anglers who have managed to get out there.

After a winter season full of flooding, it always surprises us how well trout can adapt to the enormous flowrate floods can bring.

A juvenile rainbow.

Our annual electric fishing recruitment surveys are showing that even with the high flows our rivers experienced over winter, some fish still successfully spawned, and their fry are popping out from the gravels good to go.

The tributaries have been the popular place to go of late, with more stable flows even though there has been a fair amount of rain over the past few weeks.

The Tukituki and Waipawa systems have been spared much of the high water and are producing plenty of recovering trout, along with the odd football.

Try any mayfly nymph in a brown or black shade, there are tons of them hatching in the streams right now.

Other places throughout the Tutaekuri and Ngaruroro systems have run low enough at times to allow some good fishing to be had close to town.

The Tutaekuri near Puketapu is holding great numbers of fish (pictured above) which are averaging around 3lb now.

Most fish seemed to be holding in the pool water and were very happy to take any nymph thrown at them if it had sunk deep enough.

Fish have even begun to start looking up for those larger dry flies so be sure to have a cicada or stimulator ready to go.

Down lower in the Tukituki, Ngaruroro and Tutaekuri, river conditions at times have been ideal for targeting the large sea-run brown trout who are currently feeding on the runs of whitebait.

Either a silver spinner like a toby or dandy, or a fly, like a grey ghost, fished on a sinking line can be highly successful on these impressive fish.

Try fishing the rivers just above the high tide mark, roughly where you find the final run, and you could bump into something special.

My final note goes out to one of our regular anglers Aaron Groube, pictured right.

This year he decided to keep count of his trout total for the year. Last week he caught and released his 300^th fish for the year.

This shows the excellent number of fish available throughout the region.

Congratulations to Aaron on his achievement!