Day 342: Men go Fly Fishing Again — Margaret, Willa and James Hang at Edenhouse (aka Heaven)
Jim and I booked another day fly fishing with a guide. Still didn’t catch any fish — we went 0-for-New Zealand. But we had a lot of fun.
Peter at Edenhouse had connected us with Jim Perry, a local guide. He picked us up after breakfast and we drove about 15 minutes to the Matueka River. Jim’s a big, jolly, likable Kiwi with three daughters who has spent his entire career in tourism — first as a skipper (actually did trips to White Island, the sight of the recent volcano eruption) and more recently as a fishing guide. He’s not as complex a character as Declan, the ex-pat angler vegan magician. But he’s fun to be around and was probably a better coach for a total beginner like me.
The conditions were *much* better than our rainy, windy day with Declan outside Queenstown but still, New Zealand fly fishing is a humbling sport that takes a lot of experience before you have any real chance of catching a fish. I’m not even experienced enough to explain why it’s difficult — but it’s some combination of the difficulty of even spotting the fish, the fast rivers, the wind, the challenge of picking the right fly and about 1000 other factors. The casting movements you control — which are about 4 movements in one — need to be second nature so that you can focus entirely on the external factors like what the fish, water and wind are doing at any given moment.
If you aren’t handling all of these things effectively you spend a ton of time doing “line management” — essentially untangling your line, the indicator (a piece of wool that floats on the surface) and fly / hook or unhooking the fly from a rock, stick, tree, the rod or yourself. The time spent doing line management is the equivalent of looking for your lost ball on the golf course… the worse you are, the more time you spend doing it. And if you spend a lot of time doing it, you get frustrated and loose your flow, which makes you worse at casting / hitting the ball which leads you to doing more line management / searching for your ball. Gets real unfun real fast. Luckily the guides are really good at untangling lines so Jim would come to the rescue when needed. Sorta like a caddy who keeps an eye on your ball when you shank it in the woods.
My casting got a lot better today, at times I got in a groove where I was throwing several good ones in a row. I can absolutely understand how you can get addicted to this sport — and I find it more fun and challenging than any other type of fishing I’ve done. I also appreciate the similarities to baseball and other sports where timing and relaxation are more important than “trying hard” or “muscling” your way through the technique. After several shitty casts in a row I could hear Dave Baad, my HS baseball and football coach saying, “Ted you’re playing baseball like a linebacker. Relax.”
Despite zero fish in the net, today we actually got closer to catching one. At one point Jim (the guide) was showing me a technique and got a bite. He immediately handed the rod to me. I was obviously clueless and shat the bed, eventually losing the fish. There is a whole set of techniques to actually bringing in the fish once it bites: First you need to pull up quickly to hook it because it will realize it isn’t a fly and try to spit it out. Then, because the end of your line is so thin and light, you need to really manage the tension on it otherwise the fish will run off and break the line. That’s what happened to me.
Then towards the very end of the day I was targeting a fish and actually got a bite on my own cast — a huge development given we had about 5 bites over two full days of fishing here in NZ. I pulled up, hooked the fish but then as it tried to swim off I somehow lost him. To rub salt in my wound, the line actually got caught on a stick behind a rock so it felt like the fish was still there longer than it was.
Final score: New Zealand Brown Trout: 2, Bensfield / Sullivan: 0.
We arrived back at Edenhouse to a warm welcome from Margaret, Willa, James and Peter— who fetched cold beers for Jim, Jim and I.
While Jim and I were fishing all day, Margaret, James and Willa had a great day back in Paradise / Edenhouse.
Here’s Margaret’s report from her day:
9 am was the usual morning berry bonanza. At 10 am I had a phone call with a real estate broker back in NYC. The gist of what I told him we want: The biggest place we can get that has easy access to the Seaport. We can be on an ugly street in a walkup with no doorman or gym — but big is good and so is Seaport-close or at least zippy via train. He’s on it, and told us to plan to look at places on Jan 11, the first full day we’re back.
We did school until about 11:30, then sat in the drawing room to play our new card game, Seven. Willa won.
After that — a farm walk! Took our time following a mowed path through tall grass, passing through a number of paddock gates. Stopped for photo ops and wrestling and pine cone hunting.
Rather than drive somewhere for lunch — I was actually game to give the lefthand side of the road driving a go — the kids opted to stay here and eat the fruit and crackers in our cottage.
From there, we spent the entire afternoon — five hours — reading, drawing, painting, writing, tidying and making “perfume” out of lavender. All while listening to CDs from the cottage on the little CD player.
James is our music guy, and he’s never gotten to use a CD player before. All very novel for him.
We listened to Willie Nelson, Creedence Clearwater (“Lookin Out My Back Door” is James’s on-repeat fave), Miles Davis, John Lennon, Norah Jones and, for fun, Rodriguez/Searching for Sugarman soundtrack.
All with doors open, birds tweeting, kids quietly engrossed in their own things. Peace. Heaven. Hard to imagine this happening even two months ago.
How much of this evolution is them naturally getting more mature, and how much of it is a result of this year off? I don’t think we’ll ever know?
We all showered and met up for our usual 6:30 cocktail and 7-ish dinner. It was a little warmer tonight so we ate outside. Can’t get over how insanely beautiful and comfortable this place is.
MISC:
Overheard tonight as the kids were getting ready for bed: “Mama’s really funny, especially when it comes to underpants and butt stuff.” — Willa
At one point towards the end of our day on the river I decided I had to tell our guide, Jim, The Piranha Story. Me: “Have you ever gone piranha fishing?” Jim: “No, but I’ve been to the nightclubs in Nelson, does that count?”
