Gone Fishin'

The good thing about Pucón, Chile...a river runs through it. After a day of cycling through Pucón and it's surrounding area we decided to scratch a hike up to the crater of Volcan Villarica and take this opportunity to try our hand at fly fishing. Our guide warned us that it wouldn't be likely to catch any fish our first time out, but, nonetheless, we decided we wanted to give it a shot.

We woke up early and geared up in our waders...personally, I found this to be the most exciting part. Hugo, our guide, thought we would have a better chance at catching something while trolling down the river. He set us up to troll while we were enroute to the spots where we would actually fly fish. On the way to the first fly fishing spot I caught a baby arco iris trout. The day was off to a great start.

We stopped a little way down the river and Hugo instructed us on the proper form of fly fishing. Surprisingly, we caught on (no pun intended) pretty quickly. The nice part about fly fishing is that the motion of the pole and line while standing in the river is totally meditative...we weren't worried about whether or not we would catch a fish.

After a bit of practice, we hopped back in the boat and headed to another fly fishing spot. This time while enroute, Brandon caught a full size rainbow trout. What can we say...lady luck was on our side.

At our second stop, we fine tuned our fly fishing technique by using longer lines. Apparently, Brandon really had the hang of it because he reeled in ANOTHER full size trout. We didn't get a chance to figure out what kind of trout it was because it jumped off the hook right before we could get it in the net.

Total fish count for the morning...five. I think we've found another hobby.