kate moss trout

I saw this trout early one morning on a mountain torrent in the Mackenzie district, South Island, New Zealand ... oh about a fortnight ago now. But I think it saw me first. Like many of the fish in this stream it was lying somewhere pretty obtuse and I was busy looking beyond it to the obvious water. But I saw it in time, feeding just off a fast rip in a run that ought never hold a fish. I ducked down, sat still and watched. It continued shimmying side to side and twice it rose, but to what I couldn't see. Anyway, it was clearly still feeding confidently and so perhaps I hadn't spooked it. I unpeeled the line I'd need to cover it, sent out the false casts over dry rocks beside the river turned the rod twenty degrees left to land my first cast pretty much where I wanted it to go. The trout didn't even wait for the dry hopper to drift over it. It just turned away and fekked off, like I'd insulted it or smelt bad or something. I remembered Mambo's exclamation to me over the phone after his trip here a month or two earlier: "some of those fish have got wing mirrors." Some have indeed. 

I stood up, wound in and got ready to walk upriver. But then I saw the fish pressed hard into a hollow on the far bank, beyond the rip and half hidden under a strand of roots trailing across the water. It seemed sure of itself over there, like it couldn't see me (because of the roots) and so I couldn't see it, like a kid hiding behind a curtain, shoes sticking out at the bottom. I set down my rucksack and pulled out a camera and took a couple of shots looking across the stream: you'll know the shots I mean. Shots where you can see the fish clearly, but then when you look at the picture it's like there's nothing there. 

So I pulled out my little underwater cam and decided to see how close I could get. I pushed it under and just started pulling the trigger, edging closer with every shot. The trout never moved. Not even when I had the camera in its face, moving side to side and up and down, hoping that one or two of the shots I was taking would have the fish in the middle and in focus. And all the while this Kate Moss of the trout world let me snap her again and again. How can a fish be so bonkers spooky as to disappear when a dry fly lands six feet upstream of it and so chilled when disembodied arms and legs advance towards it across the river, waving a silver box that beeps? I was happier to get the pictures than ever I would have been to catch the fish. It is rare indeed to get a trout like that, head on, in the wild and not attached to a fishing line.

Shame indeed then when I discovered later back in the camper that somehow the silly little machine had re-set itself to take diddy images on the lowest mb setting. Drat and double drat.