High desert monsters
December 21st by Chad Shmukler
Sometimes when we fish with friends, we foster an unspoken, cordial competition. You know, the “first fish, most fish, biggest fish” thing. Being successful at fly fishing means you’re likely doing something right—it’s a technical craft, for the most part, and doing it well is usually important to success. It feels good when you’re doing everything right, when you’ve put together a diverse set of elements into a single successful act, and it’s nice to measure your good fortune against others, particularly if they’re solid anglers.
And success, of course, breeds confidence, which leads you to honestly believe that every cast and every drift or swing will result in the biggest fish of the trip.
On Patagonia’s sprawling high-desert Rio Limay, take all that crap and throw it out the window. This is a river whose sheer size and volume leave so much to chance that, in most instances, it doesn’t matter one lick who’s on the business end of the fly rod ...
Read the full story in Hatch Magazine.
Monster trout?
Patagonia
Patagonia River Guides: North
Anglers plying the waters of the Rocky Mountain West often fantasize about what it would have been like to fish the trout-choked rivers in Montana, Idaho, Montana and Colorado a century ago or more — long before throngs of solitude-seeking transplants descended on those places. While those days are long gone for the American West, the good news is they are alive and well on the other side of the globe.
