Truchas Patagónicas

Patagonia always sounded to me like an impossibly distant place, conjuring images of endless desolation, horses, and slabs of steak. The trout, introduced a century ago to South America, was reason enough to do some long distance coordination, pack gear, and spend a few solid hours in the air heading more or less straight south.

Flying in to Buenos Aires you parallel the Río de la Plata, but this wasn't the water we were looking for. We headed south by bus to Bariloche, rented a car, and took to Ruta 40. This is the longest road in Argentina, stretching from the Bolivian border to Río Gallegos, almost in Tierra del Fuego, all the while hugging the eastern slope of the Andes. 

The landscape emptied quickly as we drove, but turning west into the cordillera we found lush forests again. O brought a couple pack rafts which we used to float the Río Rivadavia, locally referred to as "the aquarium". It runs crystal clear through the rainforest of Arrayanes National Park, but heavy pressure from guided rafting trips through the summer meant we saw a lot of huge trout that wanted nothing to do with our flies. This was also where we first realized the value of river wine.

After a few notable missed takes and a snapped leader that I'll never forget, we found ourselves in need of some fish to hand. We headed east to the foothills and the Río Chubut, a river flanked by dense willow, winding through pasture, reminding me of a smaller and more wadeable Bow River. We found rainbows, willing to take big foam hoppers. The largest we could see feeding behind overhanging willows, and sight fish right to them.

I fished foam nearly everywhere. A yellow bodied foam hopper and a black beadhead woolly bugger accounted for at least ninety percent of the fish I landed. Though here on the Chubut deer hair caddis were also on the menu. 

At the end of this first stretch it became clear that we weren't going to fish straight through several weeks of car rentership. So we took a few days away from the river to rejoin society, get a beard trim, talk politics in a mixed crowd of Germans and Israelis, get wine drunk on a glacier - until a bizarre series of events led us to a late night meat grill in the house of a Canadian expat. His open fireplace featured an ingenious swing-out grill contraption, which every home should have. 

Much wine later, maps were drawn, advice was given (fishing and otherwise). We were directed south again, to new water. The first creek on the map (which we were unsure would exist until we physically saw it) seemed sterile until the impossibly large cruising rainbows appeared. Only one could be enticed to take. This was becoming the norm - seeing fish in insanely beautiful places, touching only a few of them. 

 

It is worth noting that we fished this stretch of water only after sleeping off the wine in the dirt next to the car for a few hours in the afternoon. 

The map then took us further south, across yet sparser landscapes, to what felt like the end of the earth, the outlet of Lago Vintter. Here, football-shaped brook trout cruise the mouth of the Río Corcovado for just one hour after legal fishing light, a time loosely understood to be sunrise-ish. 

A makeshift camp of the diehard forms there each year in the fall, drawing Argentine fly fishers in the way that the Skeena draws steelheaders. 

We tented alongside the trailers, discovering quickly why others were taking off on quads and returning with mass quantities of firewood. The temperature dropped below freezing in the night, and the next morning we had to thaw our waders and boots in the lake before we could wrestle them on. I was still thawing when O took a brookie that only he ever saw. 

As a testament to what is possible when you befriend the local fisheries officers, a group of Argentines set up camp under the bridge over the Corcovado, complete with a woodstove, bunks, and an outdoor meat cage. The ability to have an outdoor meat cage is one of many advantages to having nearly no large predators on the landscape. After the short window of good fishing every morning they would head to the forest and pick mushrooms, lay them out to dry on the river rocks, hit up the meat cage, and start making dinner. 

From here we did a lot more driving. We went to Chile and did not fish, but threw small sticks into a luminescent-blue river only to watch them be picked off by the rainbows we did not have a license to catch. 

And found ourselves back in Argentina nearly at the end of our trip, on the Río Malleo as the winds picked up and the weather began to change. 

It was here in the final few hours on the water that the fishing became more like it had been in my imagination. Hungry, naive trout. Rainbows, and finally browns. Cue the fish pics. 

This river left us wanting more. More time casting in the relentless wind, more mornings being harassed by goats, more black coffee brewed in a sock, more red wine on river banks. 

We were chased off the water as much by the arriving cold front as by the need to make it back to the city to return the rental car. There was a fresh coat of snow on the mountains, and it felt like fall. I'd like to say I'll be back again, and maybe I will, but man is it ever far.