Paddle your own canoe

Freshwater Fishing

Occasionally we hooked bigger fish – Sam with a nice rainbow caught during a passing rain shower. (Photo: Dave Yule)

Paddle your own canoe

Your canoe awaits, sir. Travelling by dugout down the crocodile-infested Zambezi River was not Sam’s favourite boating experience.

It is hard to go past a Hares Ear or Pheasant Tail nymph in Hawkes Bay rivers.

Paddle your own canoe

With the current behind it, a fat rainbow sprints off downstream, forcing Dave Yule to follow it to the next pool.

Dave beaches a rainbow after a downstream chase through two pools.

There is plenty of room in the canoe for extra tackle. Dave Yule ties up a fresh leader.

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Canoes, kayaks and I have had a chequered past.

I have been a keen boatie for most of my life. As a kid, I occasionally had the opportunity to paddle around in various dodgy old ply canoes, and found them to be unstable, temperamental vessels at best. The almost inevitable result was a capsize and thorough wetting in some cold, muddy, weedy pond or other uninviting habitat, occasioning much hilarity from onlookers. Consequently, I went out of my way to avoid encounters with such narrow craft in my later boating years.

It was not always possible of course. A handful of years ago I did a trip to Africa with a couple of mates. The primary mission was to catch the revered tigerfish of the Zambezi River. After the successful conclusion of the fishing part of the trip, we spent a bit of time doing the tourist bit in Zambia and Botswana, visiting game parks and such.

Someone had suggested it would be fun to spend a night at a backpacker lodge situated on an island in the middle of the Zambezi River. What we didn’t know when booking was that access to the island was by rustic-looking dugout canoes. Faced with this mode of transport, as good Kiwi blokes in the company of a number of enthusiastic female backpackers, we had to put a brave face on it, but I for one was not happy when confronted with a run through several rapids in a river with a substantial population of crocodiles (and the occasional grumpy hippo).

Despite the fact that about 400 Africans are killed by crocs every year, the locals there are pretty fatalistic about the proximity of these big mobile handbags, showing no qualms about swimming, getting water or washing clothes at the same spot where a relative or friend had been taken by a croc just a day or two before.

I was not quite so blasé though, especially when I found out that, in the last wet season when the water levels were right up near the huts of the lodge we were staying at, a guy had been taken by a croc while having a drink at the lodge’s bar and dragged into the river, where he was (presumably) eaten! Alcohol can be bad for your health, alright.

Ultimately, I took mental refuge in getting my centre of gravity as low as possible, and not moving an inch as our native boatman ran the river. It turned out that this was all show for the tourists – you could actually get to the back of the island easily across a near-still pool about 20m wide (as we found out when going back the next day). Personally, I was happy when the whole buttock-clenching business was over with, and we were sitting in the bar with a nice cold Windhoek Lager – while keeping a careful eye out for any sneaky crocs, of course.

Those African dugouts were, in fact, relatively flat-bottomed and modestly stable. When you think about it, with a fair chance of a guided tour of the inside of a crocodile awaiting guys who built ‘tippy’ canoes, the development of a stable hull design is given an extra impetus. A sort of boat-building ‘survival of the fittest’.

The western design equivalent to these dugouts would be the Canadian canoe, which gains stability from its relatively wide beam and flat bottom. If you must go canoeing, this is the design to have, I reckon.

Back in New Zealand, my buddy Ross Grieve has such a fibreglass Canadian hull, and encouraged by the lack of large saurians in local waters, I was enticed out in it on a couple of flounder-spearing expeditions on Auckland Harbour. We nailed plenty of flounders and, to my relief, never capsized.

Having gained a little more faith in the Canadian design, I was a bit more receptive when an old mate, Dave Yule, suggested a couple of expeditions down some of the Hawkes Bay rivers in his own Canadian while I was down visiting my old stamping grounds last Christmas. It is my habit to chase some trout in the rivers that I grew up fishing in – the Mohaka, the Ngaruroro and the Tukituki to name a few – while visiting friends and family in the Bay over the festive season.

The only problem is, as the years have gone by, more and more people have discovered the joys of trout fishing in Hawkes Bay, and there are now a lot of fishermen, especially during the peak of the holiday season, on waters that as kids we had pretty much all to ourselves. By Christmas the trout near road-access points have had a lot of pressure and are becoming shy. Finding a bit of undisturbed water with few competing groups of anglers was getting harder and harder, and herein lay the attraction of canoe trips. This scenario is not unique to Hawkes Bay either, applying to similar waters right throughout the country.

By picking sections of a river with a decent space between public-access points, we could stash my 4X4 at our pull-out point, then take the canoe up to the top of the river section with Dave’s Hi-Lux and launch it, pinching the rubber floor-mats out of the ute to avoid scarring the inside of the hull with our newly-nailed wading boots.

Paddling downstream for a couple of miles would get us clear of the day-tripper zone, and then we would pull into the bank above likely-looking pools and wander down to fish them.

What a pleasant way to fish! After a while we got an eye for what was the most productive type of water, and just cruised downstream, picking the eyes out of what we thought to be the most likely spots. It was high summer and our best results came along the edges of the ripples, where the oxygen levels were higher, temperatures lower and the fish were hidden from casual observation.

Fishing with a pair of weighted nymphs and an indicator was efficient, with the top nymph heavier and larger than the point fly; usually a size 12 and 16 combination. It is hard to go past the good old Hares Ears and Pheasant Tails in Hawkes Bay rivers in summer, and mostly we didn’t. Our best result was hooking five rainbows from the same little shingle spit, without moving more than a metre.

Occasionally we would hook larger specimens, but most of the fish we caught over a couple of days were fit young rainbows of around a kilo and a half. They fought well on our five-weight rods and 1.5kg tippets with the fast water behind them – it was all the action we needed to put the final polish on a couple of fun trips. The fish were all released.

The canoeing itself was a lot of fun, and because we were going with the current, not hard work. Once out of the mountains, gradients of these rivers are not too steep, nor the rapids too fierce – ideal for a novice like myself. The river stone is mostly worn smooth by the time it gets to the lower country, causing little damage to the hull should it scrape bottom. And we did, regularly. The rivers were in low-flow, so navigating for the deepest water ahead was an interesting challenge. Sometimes, when the wrong decision was made, or the river just became too braided and shallow, we would get out and walk the light canoe down.

A benefit of canoe-fishing is that you can carry a bit more gear than you would usually pack on your back for a day trip. Extra tackle for unexpected angling situations, extra clothing against weather changes, a thermos flask (fire bans preclude boiling a billy at that time of year), a decent lunch, even a chilly bin with ice and a few cold drinks – all in containers strapped into the canoe as a precaution against upset.

There are some really nice aspects to this sort of fishing. Besides the primary goal of accessing areas of the rivers that see less angling pressure than normal (we still occasionally encountered other anglers), it is a quiet and restful mode of transport. I was amazed by the large amount of wildlife – especially water birds – we approached closely without disturbing. Likewise, we spotted a lot of trout that didn’t spook until the canoe passed over them – even then they didn’t display serious panic, minimising disturbance for other fishermen. It was also interesting, and often surprising, to see where some fish were lying – all added knowledge for the future.

The quiet, relaxing river-boating trips with a good mate in magnificent surrounds, getting away from the crowds and stopping from time to time to catch a few trout or have a picnic lunch on the river bank, was wholly enjoyable. Early American President Abraham Lincoln popularly expressed the idea that some of the best things in life come from ‘paddling your own canoe’. I’d come to the literal interpretation of this adage late in my boating career, but ‘Honest Abe’ just may have had something there…

- © Fairfax NZ News