Manic Mondays - G2's on the Mangatutu
It seems like the closer we get to the end of the season the more fishing we're managing to get in to try and make up for missing the mid summer stuff. That means we're dealing with high waters and less location options than usual. Matt and I decided we'd roll the dice and head off down Waikato way for a couple of days and see what we could find, the plan was to explore a bit and check out some new spots but the rain put paid to that suggestion and we ended up fishing good old Mangatutu. On the way through Te Awamutu we picked up Fish City's (they own him) Cam Forsman seeing as he is Mr Mangatutu himself. He had a great start to the day with a flat car battery and coffee left on the roof as we drove away but as expected he drew first blood on stream with a nice wee bow.
The river was running with a bit of colour and about four times higher than the summer lows which worked in our favour, the fish took a while to get on the chew but when they did it was all about the dry. We decided to leave the Radians at home this time and take a couple of Scott G2's instead, of the joys of the demo fleet. Matt was armed with the G2 8'8" 4wt and I went with the G2 9' 5wt and we had a ton of fun with these rods. It was really nice to just slow things down a bit and really get to feeling everything that was going on, having fish on was a bonus.
This nice fish came up to a small stimulator much to our enjoyment, Cam inspects a wee tag.
Cam had to work on Saturday so Matt and I ended up staying the night in Otorohanga and headed to the upper reaches of the Mangatutu the next day. Heavy rain overnight had really given the river a top up in colour but by late morning things were starting to clear and we were spotting really good fish in most pools.
Matt cleaned up a couple of really nice browns in the 3pd region and the higher we went the bigger they got. Again the fish weren't shy about hitting the dry which made the trip all the more worthwhile.
After a couple of BIG fish were dropped we turned tail and wandered back to the car ready for the drive back to the big smoke. All up a very successful weekend, fingers crossed we can sneak a couple more in before everything shuts down.