Luckily, water levels are dropping rapidly and should be back to a good level over the next day or two.
I have been staying in Middlemarch over the holiday period and I took my grandchildren Michaela and Mitchell to the Taieri, fishing just above Middlemarch Bridge.
We were disgusted to find lots of dead fish in the river, which turned out to be sea fish. They were fairly decomposed but looked like jock stewart or wrasse to my uneducated eye. At least they did not stink, being underwater, but a short distance away there were a lot of blue cod carcasses on the river bank which stank to high heaven and this is a place where locals and visitors swim and picnic.
So much for our clean, green image. To make matters worse, there were several empty takeaway coffee cups strewn on the river banks, too.
On the brighter side, there were several fish rising to a fall of spinners. Unfortunately, they did not seem to like Mitchell’s lure.
However, I was inspired to take my rod out in the afternoon. There were no spinners on the water by then but there were still a few fish rising. There were odd duns about but by the behaviour of some of the trout, I guessed they were taking willow grub.
There were a couple of fish rising at the tail of a ripple and both took a nymph but one dropped off. Further up the ripple I put on a weighted nymph and was rewarded with a good fish. I also spotted another close to the one I got.
After returning the first fish I cast at the second, which took straight off, thrashed on the top and was gone. Things were a bit quiet for a while then I spotted a fish in very shallow water, sipping something from the surface. I dropped the nymph close to it and was swimming past it when I raised the rod to twitch the nymph and the trout nailed it and proceeded to career around the pool until I netted it. At just over 2kg it was the best fish of the day.
My next outing was the Maniototo dams, as the river was too high. It was a cold, breezy morning when I started to fish Rutherfords dam. It was a while before I saw a sign of a fish. There were several rises over a small area. I covered the area with a damsel fly nymph on the point and a water boatman on the dropper.
Eventually I had a take — the fish cartwheeled out of the water and was gone. I tried a few other spots then returned to the fishy one. I saw two rises and both fish took straight away and both came to the net. It could be worth another visit soon.
