A Day Of Rest

Today has been an easy day.  Ethan arrive at about 2 so there weren’t a lot of places to fish besides the airport stream and he had asked me to save it for him.  Just a bit of housekeeping – go to the ATM, buy ibuprofen and get some groceries.    Boy did I need an easy day after three hard days of fishing with my young Dutch friend Gerlof.  Some words don’t translate exactly right but in reality they translate perfectly.   Sore is an example.  From Dutch to English it becomes “tender”.   Tender is exactly how every bone in my body feels.

Boca de Leon on the 24th was a strenuous day of fishing.  It runs fast and is a snow-melt stream so it is very cold.  Fighting the current and lose of body heat makes for a tired body at the end of the day.  I woke up “tender” on the 25th. 

Gerlof was enthralled with my account of the Perdragosa and how, just maybe, around the next bend from where I stopped above the gorge it might become more of a pampas stream.  Well after climbing around over and through four gorges we turned back.  This one damn near stopped me, but if Gerlof thought we could make it who am I to say time to go back.  We finally turned back at the next gorge, mainly because of the time.  We make it back to Coyhaique just in time to order dinner before the restaurant stopped service at 9:00.

Remember my whining on the 23rd about no new place anymore.  While I’m sure that very few, if any other, “gringo’s” fished as far up the Perdragosa as we did.  So how was the fishing?  We caught a lot of fish but nothing over 14 inches and the average was about 10 inches.  We did see a couple of 18 inch plus fish, but all the fish were extremely spooky.  Nothing messes up a good pool like little fish running from along the banks or there fight when you hook on.  If there is a next time it will be longer leaders and a quieter approach.

Two hard days of fish and I was out of ibuprofen.  But Gerlof had heard that the Rio Toque was good so we decided to head over there for a day of exploration.  The Rio Toque is about 130 Km north Coyhaique.  I had been over there on my first trip to Chile but hadn’t fished Rio Toque because of its high gradient and a big mine – Zinc I think – about 15 Km up the river.  My experience around mines in Missouri suggested that even with the best environmental protections there are still generally some environmental issues that would affect the fisheries.  But, thanks to my friend Ray, the Chilean felon, I now have 1:50,000 scale maps of that area.  According to the map, above the mine the gradient was relatively low and the Rio Toque meandered.   Just maybe it would be like the Nireguao in the Valley of the Moon!  Well it was and it wasn’t.  We didn’t walk all the way up to an area of a typical pampas stream but it had a good mix of bend pools and rocky riffles.   For those of you familiar with the East Fork of the Encampment it 

reminded me a lot of that.  Worth going back for?  It was a long day driving and fishing.  If it was closer I’d go more often.