Video: Mousing and dry fly fishing on the River of Dreams
There are a limited number of places on the globe where you can find dependable mouse fishing for trout. Kamchatka is the holy grail of mouse fishing. Alaska can offer excellent mousing opportunities when salmon aren't getting in the way. During "mouse years," New Zealand is home to otherworldly mouse-fishing. And then there's Patagonia.
Patagonia generally isn't regarded as a mouse-fishing mecca. And that's for a good reason: it's not. But with every rule there are exceptions, and Patagonia has a few. Find a Patagonian river that's both low on bug biomass—making its resident fish terrestrial-, fish-, and rodent-eaters by necessity—and that rarely see anglers, and you might just find a bounty of mouse-eating trout.
Chile's Rio Blanco, otherwise known as "The River of Dreams," is one of those rivers. The Blanco doesn't just offer the finest mouse fishing we've experienced in Patagonia, it offers some of the best mouse fishing we've experienced anywhere. But don't take our word for it, check out the video below from Jensen Fly Fishing, which features gorgeous, slow-motion footage of one big, Blanco brown trout after another chasing down bushy mouse flies stripped, swung, and twitched along the river's surface.
Oh, and there's one other thing The River of Dreams has going for it: it's open. With New Zealand's borders still closed to international travelers, Kamchatka's season somewhat up in the air due to questions about flight service to Petropavlovsk, and most of Alaska booked solid, the Blanco may just be the best mousing opportunity going right now.
But wait, it gets better. Want to experience mouse fishing on the incomparable Blanco River? You can do so this April for 10% off. Check out our specials page for more info.
Mouse fishing paradise
Patagonia
The River of Dreams
The middle section of Rio Blanco is some of the most untouched water in all of Patagonia. The lower reaches of the Blanco, near its confluence with Rio Aysén and mere miles from where the river dumps into the Pacific Ocean, can be reached via both an unimproved dirt road and by upstream jetboat—until powerful waterfalls and class IV rapids block your way. And a few miles downstream of the river's origin can be accessed by portaging across Lago Caro and hiking downriver.