Relocating from Australia to Dunedin has come with an added bonus for ODT copy editor Bruce Quirey - great fishing on his doorstep.
If you want to read about where to find trout in the South, I am still figuring that out. Skip this article and refer to the fact boxes (far right).
Fly-fishing requires patience and a degree of co-ordination. Neither of those has come naturally to me. Local knowledge also helps, and that comes with time and experience.
I am an accidental angler: the bloke who drifts a fly across a stream and, when he goes to re-cast, discovers a fish has committed an act of supreme sacrifice and attached itself.
I just happen to be at the stream - much like I just happen to be in Otago. A recently returned expatriate. A blow-in northerner. An outsider to be viewed with suspicion.
I never had much patience for fishing as a boy in the winterless north - the pointy end of the North Island. My memories of fishing in those early days are that it was salty, mostly none too successful, loosely defined by long hours and lacking fish.
We caught sprats off wharves. Some days were spent aboard Dad's 26-foot fishing boat, Frothy. There were few sizeable snapper to speak of. Maybe kahawai and small trevally. For days afterwards, the smell of mullet and squid bait seemed to linger.
Frothy once grounded on shifting mudflats in a river below Clevedon, near Auckland. Dad, a guitarist in a band, crawled on oars through mangroves, to make a phone call that he wouldn't be playing that evening. His wife, children and in-laws were stuck in a boat high and dry, waiting for the new tide.
One night in a storm, I slept soundly in my favourite nook aboard Frothy, in the bow among the sail bags and life jackets stowed astern, as the boat dragged both anchors towards rocks and, I suppose, doom. My parents battled the elements, and we and Frothy survived. I woke next morning unaware of the night's near catastrophe.
Another day, another river, after a spring tide, Dad opened the local paper to see a picture of Frothy's mast sticking out of the water. She had sunk at her mooring. Boating was over.
When I turned 21, I thought it would be a good idea to see my father's homeland, Scotland. I got there eventually and befriended a local who lived in a caretaker's cottage on a palatial estate in East Lothian.
What impressed me most, behind the cottage and an ancient doocot, was a stream with brown trout. The stream got us to talking about trout, and my friend commented he had heard how good the trout fishing was in New Zealand.
''So I've heard,'' I replied, and made up my mind to do something about it.
I bought a copy of To Cast a Trout Fly, from the House of Hardy, and stowed it away.
On return to New Zealand after three years overseas, I began learning to fly cast in the back yard.
Most trout anglers can remember their first catch.
I grew up a short bike ride's distance along a gravel road to Whau Valley Dam in Whangarei. It had never occurred to me there might be trout in the dam. But from the time I began fly-fishing, I looked differently at water. No longer was it possible to cross a bridge over a stream or see a lake without assessing its merit as trout habitat.
The dam - a slippery, clay-banked, sometimes-murky, bush-clad reservoir where trout were seldom seen to rise - became my nearest fishing spot.
The most obvious place to fish was along the dam wall, with plenty of room to cast, but I preferred to clamber through bush to access the back of the dam where small creeks entered.
One late afternoon after work, between sorting tangles, snags and wind knots, I had succeeded in flinging a wet fly a few short metres into the water. Stripping back the line, I felt weight, alive and pulsating.
The fish zig-zagged, ran for weeds, splashed about and, almost to my disbelief, eventually came to the bank: a brown trout of about a pound and a-half. In the wider scheme of angling, the moment was of little consequence, but it had a lasting effect for me.
I fly-fished as often as I could into summer, mostly in the dam, in Northland's weedy streams and in the Kai Iwi Lakes, for low returns.
Then I moved to Australia.
Off to OzFor the next 20 years, I lived a couple of hours' drive north of Sydney. The nearest trout were another 200km away, sipping mayflies under snowgums in a wilderness called Barrington Tops.
The trout fishing was hit and miss, especially in drought years. On some fishing trips, I never saw a fish.
The Tops are a subalpine wilderness. On the swampy plateau, you can leap across the headwaters of several rivers. They eventually spill over escarpments into remote, dark gorges where aircraft have vanished, never to be seen again. It's a wonderworld of snakes, leeches, brumbies, kangaroos, wombats, platypus, echidna, koalas, sugargliders, lyrebirds, kookaburras and parrots in a kaleidoscope of colours. Sometimes, there were trout.
The word ''river'' is used loosely in Australia to describe even dry creek beds that carve across vast distances. Most hold water, to varying degrees.
Over 20 years, I ventured about New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, looking for cold and out-of-the-way places that might hold trout.
More often than not, the places and their names were more memorable than the fish: to name a few, the Cobrabald River near Walcha; the Styx River at Ebor; the Turon River near Lithgow; the Macdonald River on the Monaro Plains; Three Mile Dam, near the roof of Australia; the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme dams, such as Tantangara, Eucumbene, Jindabyne and Talbingo; the Murrumbidgee River behind Adaminaby; the Swampy Plain River, on the western side of Snowies; the Cobungra River near Mt Hotham; and the beautiful Howqua River.
Trout fishing was rarely a simple day out; it was an expedition.
While fishing with some mates in Tasmania, tiger snakes swam past our knees in Arthurs Lake, I broke a rod tip and got bogged in a four-wheel-drive at Bronte Lake, and fell headfirst between boulders in the Western Lakes.
The best rewards - and there were plenty - were in the act of discovery, not always in the small, speckled, alien fish.
Occasionally, I holidayed back in New Zealand and would try to fish, without great success. A sense of haste - that the clock was always ticking - hung over those visits, swishing a rod across a river or dam near Taupo or Rotorua, or on a whirlwind tour of the South Island.
Some years ago, I spent a few weeks in a farmhouse near the Motueka River, as summer rolled into autumn. I landed a few trout and spooked a great deal more on the rivers Motueka, Baton, Wangapeka and Riwaka. Got stumped for none on the Travers, Maruia and Rai. Found joy on the D'Urville, Acheron, Clutha and Mataura.
As unforgettable as the Motueka trout were the drops of gold spraying off the fly line at sunrise, and the rings of rising trout on a pool in fading light, even when I could fool none.
Just as enduring were memories of a family of quail darting around the farmhouse, the deer outside our window, the seven varieties of plums, the wild blackberries, and the eye-popping natural beauty of the national parks.
Home sweet homeLast January, I packed my life into a shipping container and moved to Otago. Everything was new to me, and most remains so.
Places I've been to are likely to differ on any given day. I've ventured to cast flies over a few southern rivers and still waters, such as the Taieri, Pomahaka, Mataura, Mavoras and others, with mixed results.
One morning, I spied a ute parked across a paddock and a farmer standing near an open gate, close to a likely fishing spot on a river. In the distance, another ute was mustering cattle. Thinking I should do the right thing, I drove across the paddock and up to the farmer, introduced myself and asked his permission to access his side of the river. That morning, as the farmer concerned unleashed a verbal tirade, the already cloudless sky turned an even deeper shade of blue.
''You better not be one of those ... ... who complain about the ... stock in the ... river,'' he said.
''I've been doing this for 50 years. You don't just ... turn up.''
As he went on, I thought he must be joking. This will soon stop and he will laugh. He didn't laugh.
When he finally finished, I suggested I would leave and walk up from the bridge. Then he told me his name and waved his arm in a vague direction where to park my ''...'' vehicle in the paddock.
''Next time ... ring first.''
I took that as an invitation.
No sooner had the farmer finished when the other ute sped down the hill. The driver, evidently the son, leaned out his window and another tirade ensued.
''You're not ... helping. What the ... are you doing?'' I repeated my introduction and he replied, ''Move your ... truck. Go join your ... ... mates.''
It ended: ''Next time ... ring first.''
I took that as a second invitation.
Another day, I had driven along a high country trail and descended a hill, dropping out of morning fog to see for the first time a curling ribbon of water. Brown trout chopped at the surface, or shouldered their way among grassy backwaters and charged a black nymph. I hooked that morning more trout - and most larger - than in any outing, in any season, of the past 20 years.
I smiled and thought to myself: ''I live here now.''
Five great fishing spots
• Waitaki River (trout and salmon fishery)
• Lake Dunstan (easy shoreline access)
• Mataura River (world-renowned)
• Lake Wanaka (glacial lake)
• Taieri River (good fish numbers)
• Upper Manorburn Dam (high tussock country)
Five great summer flies
• Elk hair caddis
• Hare's ear nymph
• CDC emerger
• Coch-y-bondhu
• Free-swimming caddis nymph
