Graeme Christie | Tuesday, 20 October 2026
Labour Weekend is this weekend. Three days. The first long weekend of the trout season for most of the country, and the roads out of Auckland will be straining with a volume of cars. I'm heading to the Hawke's Bay.
Last year I did the same and fished a Hawke's Bay river. Lowland water, down where the tide makes a difference. The river was low and clear, mid twenties in cumecs on the Saturday morning. Low and clear usually means hard fishing. Not this time.
Saturday morning gave me five fish. One was a rainbow of 5 pounds in the sort of condition you don't often see in October. Thick across the shoulders, no spawning wear on it at all. Landed!! Four more behind it, smaller, all fit.
I went back to the gauge this week, which is a habit now. There had been a small bump in the river overnight before Saturday. Nothing you'd call a flood, but the river was up and then dropping all through the morning as I fished. By Sunday afternoon it was down to 18 cumecs and had been settling for a day and a half. So maybe the fish fed on the drop and had gone quiet by the time I got back. Or maybe it was morning against afternoon. Or the mullet moved. That's three maybes, which is one short of a theory.
What I do have is what the river was full of. Yellow-eyed mullet. Shoals of them, in the lower reaches. Smelt in among them. Whitebait pushing up the edges. The punters out with their nets. The water was moving with bait. A fish in that condition in October has been eating well, and what it had been eating was swimming past my boots.
Which brings me to the fly box. Readers of this slot will know I spent September tying smelt flies and most of the spring and even earlier looking for a trout that wanted something like that. The Hawke's Bay version of that slow tidal water is smaller and clearer. Same food. So the smelt flies get another run. White ones, and a couple tied longer and fatter to pass for a small mullet. I am not sure a bigger fly is a smelt any more. The fish can decide. If that fails I will try my selection of woolly buggers and other lure type patterns that I find work in all sorts of water. Black is a favourite colour.
The thing I want to try is dead drifting them. Not stripped. A smelt or a whitebait pattern fished like a nymph, cast up and across and left to come down with the current, with the odd twitch. Whitebait don't swim up a river with any conviction. They get pushed about in the edges and the slack water, and a trout sitting below a shoal is picking off the ones that lose their place. A fly drifting past with no life in it might be the most honest imitation I've got. The mayflies get a box too. Low clear water in late October, there should be some about, and a fish lying in a run off the bait will still take a nymph or a dun if it's put in front of it properly.
The plan. HT 6wt, floating line, the 15 foot leader down to 3x, for the dead drifted smelt and whitebait along the edges and over the shallow bars, and for the mayflies if the fish are showing. HT 7wt with the intermediate for the deeper runs. Mornings, before the sun and the other long-weekenders arrive. Watch the bait before casting at anything. If the mullet are nervous, something is under them.
The hedge. Spring weather. The gauge today reads 16 cumecs and dropping, which is near enough to last year to be hopeful. One decent fresh between now and Saturday and the river goes the colour of tea and the plan becomes a walk. I'll go anyway. Like I mentioned last year had a fresh before the weekend and this weekend we have had westerlies for what seems like months so the east coast of the North Island will likely be dry. The fish will be somewhere!
Tight lines to you all.