Have rod, will travel: Puketapu 20-year-old shines at world fly fishing champs

Hugo Pearce is now the eighth-best fly fisher in the world.

Here’s a tale to illustrate the difference between us amateur anglers and the likes of Hugo Pearce.

The Puketapu 20-year-old is back from the World Fly Fishing Championships in Slovakia, where he finished eighth.

Now, it’s not uncommon for recreational anglers to fish all day and land nothing.

Not so in the rarefied air Pearce occupies.

The world championships consisted of four river sessions and one lake session.

Competitors were given beats of 200 to 300 metres to fish for three hours. A controller followed them, with 200 points awarded for every fish landed, 20 points for every centimetre of the fish and further ranking points according to where you finished in your session.

Pearce won a session in Slovakia and was second in two others.

Guess his biggest haul.

“My best session was 42, so pretty high numbers of fish,” Pearce said.

That’s in a heavily fished area of water, which the finest anglers in the world are rotating through at three-hour intervals.

“The water’s getting more and more pressured, and it pushes you to become a better angler.”

Beyond the Czech Republic in 2019, at a world youth event, he had never fished in Europe. He barely knew the conditions or the flies required and had gone to Slovakia hoping to finish in the top 20.

Eighth was some achievement, even if he’s mostly too modest to say so.

“I was stoked. Really, really happy,’’ Pearce said.

There was a smattering of brown and rainbow trout, but the predominant species was grayling.

The water, too, was rather different from what he’s accustomed to in Hawke’s Bay.

Hugo Pearce in action.

“It’s softer, it’s less boisterous. It’s got less velocity and energy,” he said.

“It doesn’t really look different, but it almost feels like it’s less dense when you’re wading through it.”

All of which goes to show just how well Pearce did in such foreign conditions.

At 20, he hopes to have more world championships ahead of him.

At this stage, he says New Zealand isn’t sending a team to next year’s event in France.

Pearce is considering competing as an individual, but that’ll rely on things such as sponsorship.

France and Spain are the real strongholds of world fly fishing, he says, so if the competition won’t come to him, he might have to eventually base himself where the competition is.

For now, he works for Better Nature Ecological Services, which involves “possum trapping, mostly”.

But the dream is to become a fulltime fishing guide and compete more regularly in European and world events.

“I just love everything about the sport,” he said.