‘…the most momentous angling discovery of recent years…'’
F. E. THORNTON, THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD, 31 MARCH 1934
FROM THE VERY EARLIEST DAYS of the Taupō fishery, a wide range of angling methods was permitted on the Tongariro river. Spoon, minnow and artificial fly were all allowed — in a nutshell, the rule was anything except live bait.
Although New Zealand fly patterns were developed over time, the first anglers to tread the banks of the Tongariro used salmon fly patterns transplanted from their UK home. The river flowed deep and broad and its fish were salmon-size, so it must have seemed logical to fish with such standard flies from ‘Home’ as Silver Doctor, Bulldog, Jock Scott, Thunder and Lightning, and Butcher.
It was also necessary to fish deep in a pool to get results. The correspondent ‘March Brown’, writing in The New Zealand Herald in 1923, advised the use of lead to get the fly well down, adding that he had never heard of a trout being caught with a fly fished at the surface.
Even though the large wet fly fished deep was the prevailing angling orthodoxy, there were occasional exceptions which showed that Tongariro rainbows would come to a surface fly. On a calm, bright day in May 1927 an English angler, N. F. Bostock, took eight rainbows from the Log Pool by fishing a small, lightly dressed fly just under the water surface. Bostock was applying the technique that his friend A. H. E. Wood had used for catching salmon on Scotland’s River Dee.
ALAN PYE
The Tongariro river was the first Taupō waterway to see dry flies used to tempt the rainbows and browns. In 1924 Alan Pye, an unpredictable Irishman, demonstrated the technique on a small King Country stream to fellow anglers Trevor Withers and Frank Yerex. Pye’s Waikato river fishing lodge
