Our first Christmas as a married couple has been interesting and unconventional. We booked our accommodation about a week ago for Reefton, NZ because we were planning around our fishing schedule. We arrived yesterday to fish the upper Inanaghua River and spend the night near town. We arrived to wet, rainy, and flooding conditions. In NZ, EVERY store, restaurant, and business closes for Christmas Day and Boxing Day (26th). We did not realize this until we got here yesterday to dodge the rain and talked to a few locals. We thought there would surely be one café open for a Christmas meal, like in the States…  So we had to rush and get groceries, gas, and eat our Christmas lunch out the day before. We fished for about an hour in the afternoon and landed one nice fish, and then the river began to rise and we were forced back to camp.

We arrived to town this morning and like we figured, it is a ghost town. We checked into our cabin and will be enjoying steaks and wine for dinner, which we had to get yesterday. We have been on a fishing binge since Murchison. We fished the upper Buller River for 2 days where we had amazing fishing and landed about 10-12 fish a day, and David had an epic swim down the river to land one of the fish. It took him about 45 minutes to get to the pool on the other side of the river and get into position. Once hooked, the fish headed straight down river into the rapids. We then fished the Owen, Mangles, Glenroy, and Travers Rivers.  We hiked in for 3 days and stayed at Coldwater Hut in the Travers Valley. We landed some big fish on that river, and on the second day we saw at least 15 huge fish. They were very picky and ended up having to fish size 18 flies on 5x tippet…… not our choice for the big guys. We had amazing weather and great fishing for that weekend. We met some interesting people along the trail and had a great time. We then ventured over to fish the upper Grey and Maruia Rivers, and Morgan got sick for a few days. We had some bad, wet weather and took a little break from fishing.

On a nice sunny day we hiked up to Lake Daniels up in one of the valleys, and it was a good change of pace from fishing. We stayed at a DOC campground for the night and Morgan and I got a kick out of watching some of the holiday campers come in. We saw Barbie and Ken on their first outdoor trip. It took them forever to figure out how to put the tent and tables up in their Nike shoes, skinny jeans/ mini skirt, and polo shirts. Then the German exchange students showed up with their American girlfriends, and it took them about 2 hours to set up camp because they stopped to kiss every 2 minutes. We are seasoned camping pros now, and have no time for such foolishness.   We were able to get Morgan well and have finally made it to Reefton, an active gold mining town. The rivers here are flooded in this area as of now, so we are going to head down the west coast towards the Franz Joseph and Fox Glaciers before New Year’s. We are both exhausted after each day because we are doing so much, but are still having a good time. We hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and will talk with you all soon!

Cheers,

Morgan and David