Pesca en Pucon!

After a long and very hot bus journey from Bariloche, Argentina, another border crossing and a few more stamps in our passports, we arrived in Pucon, Chile. With its reputation as the outdoor adventure capital of Chile we were not surprised to find the streets lined with agencies offering rafting, canyoning, hydro-speeding, kayaking, horse riding and the like. Having done our share of these, we were again really keen to do something a bit different (this is becoming a bit of a motto for our trip) and found ourselves negotiating a day of fishing on a nearby river. I must admit that I’ve never had a burning desire to learn to fish but was willing to give it a try and actually found myself strangely eager to don waders and get into the river for a fly fishing lesson. The agency owner managed to convince us that we should in fact try both fly fishing and ‘spinning’, which he told us was easier and much more likely to yield us a catch or two.

The next morning we were collected from our hostel and driven to the beautiful river outside town. Our fishing guide spoke very little english (“more line” and “stop” were about his limit) but rowed our boat or managed to keep us static in the fast flowing sections admirably. We began with ‘spinning’ which had a small, brightly coloured, plastic fish attached to the end of the line. With no finesse whatsoever, I unceremoniously dropped my plastic fish over the side of the boat and began to let out ‘more line, more line’ according to the guides instructions and within what must have been only 20 or 30 seconds I felt a tug on the line. “Fish, fish”, our guide assured me and told me to reel in the line and, sure enough, I’d managed to catch my first fish, a (very small) trout! Convinced that I had in fact had a fish attached to the hook before my line touched the water, Simon was less than impressed by my supreme fishing skills and I was beginning to think that I’d found a sport that I might be better than him at...I was indeed getting ahead of myself!

Over the next three hours Simon managed to catch five fish using both the spinning and fly fishing rods while I sat patiently with nothing but a couple of fruitless bites on the end of my line - that’ll teach me! Surprisingly I really enjoyed my first fishing expedition and although I’ll not be rushing out to buy a fishing licence on our return, I would definitely try it again.