An article by Fred Parry.

It has always been an ambition of mine to travel to Tierra Del Fuego for the seatrout and, at the end of March, that wish came to fruition with a trip to Maria Behety Lodge on the Rio Grande, organised directly with The Fly Shop in the US.

We had made our own flight and accommodation arrangements so that we could have some time in both Buenos Aires and Ushuaia on the trip.

Anyone who wants to make this trip needs to be happy about long haul flights and to consider the vagaries of Aerolineas Argentina who do all the internal flights in Argentina. They fly when they want to (no explanations or apologies for delays) and furthermore change the destination airport without explanation or apology, this does tend to throw your arrangements into disarray.

Having overcome all the problems and finally arriving in Tierra Del Fuego we were collected and taken on a four-hour drive by 4 x 4 to the lodge which is about  400 metres from the Rio Grande, the lodge is fantastic offering 5-star accommodation and food, but this article is not about that it”s about fishing.

The Rio Grande is a big river about the size of the Wye flowing through the bottom of a shallow valley and fed by two huge lakes which are in turn fed by glacial and snowmelt from the Andes in Chile, so the levels are fairly stable.

The first morning I borrowed a 12.5 ft Sage rod because ours got lost en route however I was totally under-gunned with the river high and the wind trying to blow me over (it was a downstream wind)

I must point out here that the wading is very easy with gravel bottoms or fishing from the banks, so with only a couple of pulls in the morning ( 8 till 12 ) session, I needed a much bigger stick to put out a 24ft long very fast sinking shooting head with about half a rabbit as a fly (4 “5-inch long leech pattern with the aerodynamic qualities of a house brick and nearly as heavy).

However, as a fisherman, we are bred as true optimists so we went out for our second session of the day (4 till 8) and began to get out a respectable length of line with a borrowed 16ft Daiwa (still not easy and certainly not pretty).

Ten minutes in and something very large decided that it liked rabbit and took my fly, it felt like a submerged log as it sped of downstream, shaking its head and obviously not at all happy.

After about 15 minutes of a very one-sided struggle (I was on the losing side) the fish was lost, no idea how big but it felt very good.

Back up to the pool again and casting (Mark it really wasn’t very pretty) this lead weight and very quickly I was into another submerged log, only this log was going upstream, after a couple of minutes the fish jumped over on the far side of the pool, when I saw it I knew I was in for a hell of a fight.

After a short time of moving upstream, the fish decided that it wanted to go back to sea and proceeded to strip line until about 70 ” 80 metres of backing were out, the drag on my reel was smoking and meanwhile our guide was making a good attempt at breaking the 400-metre world record in an effort to get himself and a landing net about half the size of Abergavenny below the fish.

It all got a bit complicated when the fish went down the main channel and the guide had to wade up to his armpits across a side channel to have any chance of getting near the fish, however, he did manage to get across and was in position when I finally managed to control the fish.

After about 25 minutes my arms were wrecked by the pressure the fish was putting on the line, but the fish came across the stream and the guide netted a 24lb monster of a sea trout (I am not sure who was the most knackered me or the fish) however the fish was tagged, measured and released without fuss and swam off well to travel on to the spawning grounds at the head of the river.

Back to the fishing and the pool yielded another fine sea trout of about 16lbs and lots of pulls from other fish, before it was time to get back to the lodge for dinner.

The rest of the week carried on in much the same way and yielded for me another 16 fish between 3.5 lb and 17lb many of them bars of silver, fresh off the tide, with a total of about 100 fish for the week between the 6 rods.

This is fantastic fishing but you have to work very hard for every fish, the weather conditions make for very difficult casting and I would suggest that unless you are first class with a single-handed rod, take and use a big stick even if the conditions are perfect.

I tried overhead casting in the windy conditions and very nearly decapitated myself with big flies end even bigger hooks. The flies that were successful are very similar to those used in British Colombia and Alaska for Pacific salmon and steelhead, not very sophisticated but large and very strong in dark colours with plenty of movement in the fly.

Argentina is a fantastic destination and would be the trip of a lifetime for the serious fly fisherman, but be advised, take lots of layered clothing, even in good conditions it can be very cold, the wind presents challenges for even the most expert of fly casters, and the weather is about as predictable as a wife with serious PMT but the sunsets are fantastic.

Finally, Argentina is not much good as a destination if you are vegetarian, in one restaurant we visited, the waiter brought barbecued steaks for the first course and proceeded to put 2 one-pound steaks on the plate just as a starter!!!.  Anyone considering going that would like to have a chat about it please get in touch via the club sec. Mark Roberts

One more word of warning, the guides are totally crap with a net and it was a surprise that more fish were not lost, if they were over here I wouldn’t let them net a bag of sprouts.

Tight lines,

Fred Parry