Mohaka River

Mighty Mohaka

 

There are some misconceptions about the famous Mohaka river. The first view most anglers get of this Hawkes Bay river is the fleeting glance down from the lofty heights of the Napier-Taupo road bridge. The first impression is ‘BIG’ and it is but down at river level, it looks a lot different. You would miss out on a lot of fish and a lot of fun if you fished this river using only big river techniques. I have been fortunate to have been taught how to fish the Mohaka by my good Napier fishing mate, Roy. The first lesson came on a warm day in March, many years ago. Roy and I had set out early from Napier on a glorious autumn Tuesday. We usually managed to sneak off work for one day midweek and, in those days, you were pretty well assured of having the river to yourself. Roy’s favourite stretch of the river is around the Pakaututu Bridge up the Puketitri road. There is one and a half hours of this windy road up to Pakaututu and usually Roy had a touch of carsickness by the time we reached the bridge. For years he blamed this on my driving but it later turned out that it was caused by a balance deficiency easily remedied by wearing a patch behind his ear. I always thought that a patch over his eye was more appropriate the way he used to rifle through my fly boxes!

It looked like we were in for a glorious day when we finally pulled up at the main bridge over the Mohaka at Pakaututu. After the usual moans about my driving, we tackled up and headed down to the river. We decided to use our mid-weight gear as there was a strong westerly blowing down the river.

“So, what do I put on” I asked, “something pretty heavy?” eyeing the large pool under a cliff upstream.

“No, definitely not,” replied Roy.” You want to be fishing the edges so put on a lightly weighted size 14 Hare’n’Copper”, he advised. Bowing to his superior local knowledge, I put on one of my own flies,  a Flashback Hare’n’Copper that I had recently invented. It was a cross between the standard H & C but I had added a flashback after seeing Frank Harwood’s Halfback nymph with a silver metal foil flashblack. Not being a cigarette smoker, for my ‘flash’ I had used pearl mylar strands that I had got from a USA mail order house specialising in fly tying materials. The idea of the flash was originally attributed to Jim Ring who featured in Tony Orman’s classic ‘Trout on the Nymph’. Jim had the theory that successful flies should incorporate an exaggerated trigger to make your fly stand out from the normal. This has been described as a ‘super emerger’ and the flash was to represent the air bubble used by the nymph to rise to the surface to hatch. I had decided to incorporate that idea into the most successful of fast water flies – the Hare’n’Copper. The other innovation that proved very successful with this fly was the use of dark coloured hare underbody to form the bulky thorax of the fly. The theory here was that hatching nymphs have a dark prominent wingcase when they are about to hatch. This variant always out-performed the lighter coloured thorax and many of my angling mates switched to tying their Hare’n’Coppers in this fashion. Roy of course did not bother – he just nicked mine.

So it was with some confidence that I fastened on this proven fly and was all set to fish.

“Probably best if you take this side and I’ll go up the far side,” suggested the local expert.

“You can climb up that ridge and then get down to the river above the cliff” said Roy.

In those early days of fishing with Roy, I tended to take his advice as gospel so off I trotted and climbed up the ridge above the first pool. My confidence in his directions was soon eroded when I looked down from above at his suggested route down to the river bank. This consisted of a steep, rocky slope leading into a forest of blackberry along the bank itself. As there was no obvious alternative, I gingerly started down the slope wishing I had a couple of more legs like the only other animals that had preceded me. Half an hour and various traumas later, I was crawling through the blackberry on rough sheep tracks. Finally I emerged at the river side to find Rory fast into a fish on the other side of the river.

“What happened – did you get lost or something? You are wasting valuable fishing time mucking about like that. I’m into my second fish already”.

I choked back a vitriolic rejoinder and disentangled my leader from the blackberry.

“So where are they lying?” I asked the successful angler.

“The browns will be along the edges in the shallow water and the rainbows will be in those riffly bits” advised my mate.

“But those riffles look rather fast” I queried, looking out at the fast flowing water in the middle of the wide river.

“No, its not as fast as it looks,” said Roy, “there are rocks in the middle of the riffle and the fish can lie behind them sheltered from the flow”.

“Oh really,” I said with only a touch of disbelief. Two rainbows later from a 50 m stretch of riffle, I was contrite and acknowledged he was right.

The browns proved a little more difficult as they lay in very shallow water, just out from the bank. It was hard to land the 7 weight line gently in the gusty wind and I scared two good fish halfway up the run. The next stretch up was very shallow at the edges and so I fished further out into the river where the water was around a metre deep. However one cast was blown by the wind into the water just up from me about half a metre from the edge and about 10 cm deep. As I was about to retrieve the line from this poor cast, there was a swirl and the line stopped. I lifted the rod wondering what on earth was going on when a large brown threw itself out of the shallow water and landed with a huge splash.

“Good fish” admired Roy from across the river.

And so it proved to be when I eventually  landed a 6 lb brown 15 mins later at the tail of the pool below. I could not credit just how shallow that brown was lying. I had not spotted her as I was concentrating on the water further out thinking there was no chance of a fish that close to the water’s edge. I reckon her dorsal fin must have just about been sticking out of the water had I only looked in the right direction. It was a lesson I never have forgotten and now always study the shallow waters before fishing deeper. I think it was Jim Sierpinski of ‘Hairy Dog’ fame that always advised ‘fish your feet first’. He was talking about stream mouth fishing but the advice is also very relevant to river fishing. Jim proved his point one night by catching a fish from between the legs of a wading angler in front of him!

Roy and I continued upstream fishing our respective sides but there were no more takers up that long run. I crossed over at the wide tail of the next pool as Roy said that was the last safe crossing before I ran into more cliffs on my side.

“How come I got the cliff and the blackberry and you got a pool full of fish?” I inquired with as much grace as I could muster.

“Gee, is there blackberry there now?” came the grinning reply. “There was nothing like that last time I went down there.”

“And how long ago was that?” I asked.

“Oh, I guess it must be 10 or 15 years ago now; amazing how that stuff grows!”

I could see I was not going to get a hint of an apology so I soldiered onto the next pool. This had heavy rapids at the head and the strong flow had carved out a very deep pool with fast water on the far side. It looked like it would have been good fishing with a spinner but not with a fly. However as I edged along the unstable stoney bank, I spotted a good fish holding about 2 metres deep at the edge of the main flow. Roy came up beside me and I pointed out the fish.

“You’ll need a bit of weight to get the fly down to him in a hurry” suggested Roy.

“Well I wasn’t going to put on a size 18 dry”, I rejoined.

“Yeah, well, it might be time to drag out your Tongariro bombs,” said Roy.

I dug out the flybox and scrounged around for a heavy nymph. I found a Halfback Bugeye that looked the goods and knotted that on with the Hare’n’Copper tied to its bend. In went the whole rig with the usual Tongariro open loop cast. It’s always easy to tell a fisherman that fishes that river a lot – they all duck as they cast! Anyway the heavy rig plonked into the fast water just below the rapids and sank quickly. As the fly neared the fish, I was trying to decide if it was best to watch the fish or the indicator when Roy screamed ‘strike!’. He had seen the fish move over and take the nymph while the indicator 3.5 m above had not begun to move. Another lesson – when you can see the fish, don’t worry what the indicator is doing. By the time it moves, the fish may have spat out the fly.

Fortunately the scream in my right ear galvanised me into action and I struck hard knowing I would have to move the fly quickly to overcome the length of the leader in the strong current. It turned out that the excess of Irish coffees the night before had not slowed the reflexes too much and a solid strike was made. Off raced the rainbow with me in hot pursuit. My concentration was not aided by the running commentary from my mate such as ‘stop playing with him, you wimp’ and ‘c’mon, we haven’t got all day.’

Even with such incentives, it took another 20 minutes before a beautiful 8 pounder lay flapping in the stones.

 

 

 

“Well, not too bad for a beginner,” said Roy with as little grace as he could muster. “But I’d hate to see how long it would take you to land a decent size fish”.

As it happened that fish was the best of the day and was typical of just what this great river can produce. Certainly it is not as pleasant fishing with a heavily-weighted fly but there are occasions on the Mohaka when you have to get ‘down and dirty’. We especially noted this in the winter months when a cold southerly  was blowing. In those conditions, the fish were all lying deep in the pools and you had to fish heavy or go home empty-handed.

So a bit wiser and somewhat wearier, a few hours later we made our way back to the van. It had been a good day and hopefully Roy would be too tired to whinge about my driving all the way home.