Summer is a little delayed, in case you haven't noticed. So if you're a once a year Christmas holidays angler you may find things a little different this year. Different, maybe! But most likely, it's going to be much much better. Take a look at the results from a couple of days walking one of the North Islands lake egdes for Greig Cousins and Simon Chu. (All photo credits Greig Cousins and Simon Chu)

Greig Cousins hoists a lunker from the shallows. These fish are taken on #4 and #5 weight rods, proving you don't need heavy tackle for NZ's lakes. In fact these light rods are ideal for picking out spooky browns from the shallows.

Simon Chu, showing that his South Island stalking skills work a treat in the North Island too.

A cracking rainbow that fell to a redhead damsel. Rainbows often work slightly deeper water, so taking your time to work a fly through holes in the weedbeds can be surprisingly rewarding.

Not all stillwater nymphs are tiny. These bulky dragonfly nymphs are commonplace on NZ lakes and are easily imitated with a small olive or brown woolly bugger.

As always when you have limited time to fish this Christmas, make sure you think of something different to do so you can get away from the masses and reap rewards like this hefty brown from shallow water.

After a fair bit of bugging by our retailers we're bringing in the tungsten beads that we've been using on our Manic fly patterns. These little guys have more tungsten than most beads on the market so they sink super quick, this makes them great for making bombs and also means you can downsize your fly pattern and still be confident of getting your fly down.

Also they come in a bunch of cool anodised colours, like green, blue, pink, purple and red. For those of you that would prefer to stick with more subtle colours, the new coffee coloured beads are a hit as are the classic black beads.

This is the range we are running, not all of the colours come in all of the sizes but  there should be plenty to choose from.

These beads are great for spunking up a traditional pattern or for creating something totally new.