Fishing: Skill catches, maturity releases

I took my grandson to the Tongariro to teach him flyfishing. At age 12, it was time to get him interested before the arrival of puberty and girls distracted him from life's higher pleasures.

As a father and grandfather, I have always believed it is my duty to pass on the skills taught to me as a boy. I taught my son and daughter to flycast when they were 11 and 12. My son went on to become a superb flyfisher. My daughter learned to cast expertly but had no interest in fishing.

I used to tell her: "You can still come on trips and clean and carry the fish and look after the kitchen for the guys. That would be fun!"

Her cheerful expression would solidify into something like a piece of ancient rock from the Great Wall of China, so I felt it unwise to pursue the matter.

So we'll see what we can do with her son, Jacob Dawick of Whangaparaoa, a keen seafisher but a bit unsure about this flyfishing business. I showed him the basics of casting and left him to practise on grass at a park near his home for 15 minutes every day for a week.

At the Tongariro I put him into the Upper Birch Pool, a top spot for a beginner with its mix of fast and slow current and good fish-holding water within easy reach of thigh waders.

When Tongariro fishing is full-on, you can catch two big ones in two casts, but I didn't want anything like that happening because it would spoil him for life. Nor did I want him putting in too much effort without success or his enthusiasm would die.

He found it difficult adapting to the river, especially when he had to battle the flycaster's biggest enemy, the wind. But he kept at it in short bursts when the weather allowed, his interest maintained by seeing others round him catching fish but disappointed at getting no strikes himself, and frustrated when he became tired and his casting fell apart.

"Take a rest but never give up," I would say. "The best things in life take practice."

Adding to his woes: each time I gave him my rod to play a fish I'd hooked, he'd break it off at the nymph by pulling too hard.

"Forget everything you ever learned about seafishing," I'd tell him. "You're not pulling in a dog on a leash."

He was fascinated to see other fishers releasing their catches. I explained the principles of catch-and-release, that we keep only a few of the top-conditioned fish and put back 95 per cent of our catch, especially the thin, dark, "spent" fish that have spawned and are weak and inedible. In the words of Hauraki Gulf guru Bruce Duncan, "Keep a few for a feed and let the rest breed."

Jacob said he would tell his father to put back their 27cm snapper in future.

We were four days in and Jacob, still fishless, believed he was jinxed. But on this day the weather came right and his casting improved out of sight. As I fished nearby and watched him doing everything correctly, zapping the line out like a growing professional, I knew it was only a matter of time and luck.

It's all very well for a boy to pull in a fish that someone else has hooked, but to become a fully fledged angler he needs to hook it himself, to experience the crucial moment of the strike, when he suddenly finds himself harnessed by the lightest possible tackle to a magnificent wild creature that is about to fight for its life.

I heard Jacob yell, and turned towards him. His strikemarker had bobbed under, the rod was bucking and a prime Tongariro rainbow leaped a metre out of the water. He played it patiently through its bursts down the current, and eventually landed it on the beach.

Then he did something I would never have believed possible of a 12-year-old boy with his first fish.

He wet his hands to prevent the trout's protective layer of slime sticking to dry hands, deftly removed the hook, picked up the trout carefully with one hand under the throat and the other round the tail, walked out and held the fish under the water pointing upstream and slowly opened his hands.

The fish hung there, recovering, then flicked its tail and flashed off into the deeper water where it belonged.