It’s hard to believe only 3 weeks remain for New Zealand before heading to Singapore on February 18^th. A lot has happened since New Year’s, and we are sorry we have not kept everyone updated on our travels.  Our last post was New Year’s in Greymouth. The plan was to spend another week or so on the West Coast to fish and then head south towards Queenstown. Well that plan fell through as it rained and had flood conditions all along the west coast. We probably checked out 15 different rivers to fish and all were the same: flooded, muddy, and un-fishable. We did not fish for 9 days!! David was very antsy, but we did manage to do a lot of sight-seeing during that time and zoomed down the coast to better weather. Here’s what we did for those 9 days before we made it back to the water:

1. Went to Hokitika and explored this town for a day.
2. Went to Fox and Franz Joseph Glaciers as well as Lake Matheson
3. Spent the day in Haast, stuck at the pass, trying to get to Wanaka but the road was closed due to flooding. We stayed at the DOC office with all the other frustrated travelers
4. Spent two days in Wanaka, Lake Wakatipu hiking and sight-seeing.
5. Spent a couple more days in Queenstown and Arrowtown sight-seeing and hanging out.

The weather then took a turn for the better and we packed into the Greenstone Valley to fish the Greenstone and Caples Rivers for 4 days. We had great sunny weather and stayed at some of the DOC huts up in the valley with fellow trampers. We caught tons of rainbow trout dry fly fishing and saw almost no other anglers, which is rare for this area. After that we headed south to fish the Oreti, Mararoa, and Aparima rivers. We had good fishing here too and bounced around these rivers for another week. We made a trip over to Te Anau where we fished the Eglington River for 2 days and took a Milford Sound Cruise one day. We still had perfect weather, which is unexpected for a place that gets 200 days and 20 feet of rain a year! We gave the Mararoa and upper Oreti some more days where we saw and caught some huge fish. The upper section gets slammed with anglers and you have to show up early to get a “beat” section of water to fish for the day. We rolled up at 6:50 AM and still were not the first ones there….. Morgan was sleeping in the back when we drove up! Some Norwegians beat us there, but we did manage to get the upper section to ourselves which required 20 km of walking for the day. We caught some big, very spooky fish with beautiful scenery. Today we decided to check out the town of Invercargill, the southernmost part of the South Island. We needed a break from fishing…. David actually said the other night “I am getting burnt out on fishing since we have been going at it for over 2 months.” Good thing we have those quotes documented for future use. Tomorrow, we are going back up to fish the Mataura and Aparima Rivers, followed by Dunedin, Mount Cook, Lake Tekapo. The last two weeks we will spend on the West Coast fishing what we couldn’t after New Year’s. We are just going to keep an eye on the weather as the time gets close to driving that way, everything always depends on the weather. We have had so much fun, and have had no issues except for someone in Tokyo stealing our credit card number and buying books from Amazon…. We got it all sorted out….. Oh and David’s unruly, “girthy” beard which he refuses to shave. We’ll drive to Christchurch on Friday Feb. 14, and ship all of our fishing and camping gear home. The weekend will give us time to organize ourselves and take some day trips near Christchurch until we leave on the 18^th. We think we will be home around May 20^th, but will let everyone know when we purchase our return tickets. We hope everyone is doing well, and we miss you all.

Cheers,

Morgan and David