By Neil King Jr.
A week unlike any of the other 3,000 or so I have spent on Earth began as a birthday surprise from my wife. Seven days at a remote fly-fishing lodge in Argentina, in the far south of Patagonia. It was the surprise that just kept on surprising.
Here we were, the fly-fishing equivalent of duffers, booked to fish some of the most challenging bucket-list waters in the world. Patagonia is the land of lunkers—huge sea-going brown trout, steelhead, Pacific salmon—in big rivers that demand finesse and serious casting chops. The lodge’s list of recommended gear went on for a page: Two-handed Spey rods, this and that fly line, flies with names like Wooly Buggers and Chernobyl Ants. Learning to cast those rods alone would be a treat.
“This is some pretty intense stuff, Shailagh,” I said to my wife, marveling at the materials. “We’ll figure it out,” she replied.
That we had to bring our own gear was daunting in its own right, and required some additions to my flyrod collection. A friend showered me with videos on proper Spey casting techniques—the two-handed method pioneered in Scotland in the 1880s to hurl flies across the gusty River Spey. New rods in hand, we practiced on the Potomac River near our house in Washington—a sobering experience.
Our destination was the Estancia Las Buitreras, a vast and gorgeous sheep ranch three hours by jet from Buenos Aires and as far south on the globe as Labrador is north. It was a landscape as horizonless as the American prairie but with volcanic necks and huge random rocks of solidified lava that added to its end-of-Earth feel. Cutting through the estancia flowed 25 miles of the meandering Rio Gallegos, which brings snowmelt down from the Andes and sea trout back up to spawn. That river would be our focus for the week ahead.
As we settled into the lodge—crisp guest rooms upstairs, dining table for 16 and ample room to sprawl downstairs—we started to swap tales with our fellow anglers. A father and son duo from the far north of Scotland. A professional fishing guide from Wyoming. Two buddies fresh up from fishing in Tierra del Fuego. Another guide from Connecticut and his wife. In all, 13 anglers who had clocked thousands of hours on rivers around the world. Eleven men, two women. Including us, the duffers.
The intimidation factor ticked up a notch when I learned that the group included four of the world’s premier casters, certified master casters who spent whole afternoons on the lodge’s front yard practicing specialized casts and tossing around pointers. Masters instructing masters, like Tom Brady fine tuning the screen pass with Aaron Rodgers.
Our first full day, well breakfasted and snapped into our waders, Shailagh and I set out at 8:30 sharp with our first guide for the week, Carlos, in one of the ranch’s mighty Toyota HiLux 4X4s. The plan was to fish the river’s six huge zones twice over the coming six days, once in the morning and once at night, so that we saw all of its varieties in all sorts of light.
Ahead of us stretched a lot of fishing. As in, a whole lot of fishing. Four hours in the morning, followed by a large lunch and a long siesta, and closer to five hours in the evening, from 5:30 until darkness fell around 11:00. For six days in a row.
Grins wide and feet in the current, we were at last casting flies into a river in Patagonia, not quite elegantly but with enough distance to earn a nod from Carlos on shore. We’d arrived. We were in the hunt.
I got lucky and felt an explosion in the first half hour: a 12-pound sea trout that darted and leaped and splashed water in my face when we let him loose. Hardly a sign of skill, as I found out, but I was on the board.
With tips from the guides and a lot of practice, our casts improved. When we got the motions right, the complex began to feel simple and the line shot through the rod with such satisfaction that you hardly cared about the fish. You became entranced by the rhythms, the flickering of the river and the abundant birdlife. Time itself took on a liquid quality and slipped by unnoted.
We drove back some nights across the pampas with the last silvery sheen of the day still on the river. Sheep, the ostrich-like rheas, the graceful guanacos, tall hares, caracara hawks and black-necked swans all scattered at our approach. As the swans took flight, they transformed in just yards from ungainly to the quintessence of grace. The sheep remained clumsy no matter how far they ran, but their plenitude turned huge meadows into a glimpse of Eden.
The lodge resounded during the off hours with a singular obsession for fish. By the third day I felt I had joined a monastic order committed solely to fishing, with a vow of silence unless talking of fish. When not fishing, sleeping, eating, practicing casts or telling fish stories, this brotherhood sorted flies, swapped out lines on fishing rods, or studied the giant map on the wall to plot the next outing. Truly divine.
It was a week of huge skies and a superabundance of air. A week where the wind, rain and sun were all experienced firsthand, and at great length. A week where most waking hours were spent knee deep in the waters of a river. It was a week, too, of enforced dexterity when you tried to train the fingers, wrists and arms to master new skills. The tying of a double surgeon’s knot. The left-shoulder casting of a 13-foot Spey rod.
We fished calm waters under grey skies and in full sun. We fished in the heaviest of winds, with gusts that would ground planes at LaGuardia. We fished when it was gusty, cold and wet—weather others would call miserable but that we somehow found hilarious.
“That was amazing,” Shailagh said, piling into the HiLux after an hour casting against 40-mile-an-hour crosswinds. I had watched in awe as the waves beat at the backs of her waders and the last light seeped from the sky.
We generally tally our travel pleasures by vineyards visited, mountains hiked, sunsets seen. In Patagonia, rod in hand, you just want the perfect moment when you anticipate the huge sea creature, divine the pool in which he rests, and then lure him from the depths with the well-placed fly. And if you are lucky, that explosion of life, that jolt on the line after so many casts, brings it all together.
We both had those moments, and bragged of them back in the lodge. Friends at home had their humdrum days disrupted with photos of us in odd headwear gripping huge trout in a summer far, far away. I caught more, dare I add, than two of the master casters.
Rarely do we set off on trips that demand mastering new skills. That test our dexterity and balance. The reward is a higher form of enchantment. One evening I fell into a rhythm of making long casts to exact targets far across river, casts that went taut straight to the reel, and thought: Please don’t let this end. Just a little more light. Just a few more casts. Such was the joy of standing there.