Nice little film of a virtuoso Speycaster

[Paul Boote]

Oh my lord .. just joined FM yesterday .. looking thru the forum and came across you two... almost forgot about it as it was you pair at it years back on an other forum , cannot believe your still battling away .

Anyway .. nice video's .

Hmm ... yes...

THIS paulb has majored on just going fishing in his long Angling life; what others make of him / me is up to them and entirely their problem if they have one.

Welcome to FM, er, paulb.

---------- Post added at 11:07 ---------- Previous post was at 10:54 ----------

Good fish, Geoff. I had one of the same size (my biggest) on another Chilean trip in the early 2000s. Fly around and pull a bit, don't they? Leave the great majority of Atlantic salmon for dead, fight-wise. Those wishing to see just how they "go" should look for a short video made last year (YouTube? Vimeo?) by the Salmon Junkies fishing travel outfit about Canadian British Columbian Skeena River steelhead.

Here is that Skeena steelhead movie I mentioned. Some fish.

[ame=http://vimeo.com/66457561]SKEENA – THE BIGGEST AND MEANEST STEELHEADS IN THE WORLD! on Vimeo[/ame]

 

[paulb290]

Welcome to FM, er, paulb. Thank you

 

[Paul Boote]

A far cry from the great majority of British stillwater rainbows - the steely ever-leaping monsters of a lake in southern Argentina filmed by the camera of the very fine Todd Moen - [ame=http://youtu.be/afcg1H2MRN0]Strobel Lake by Todd Moen - Argentina Fly Fishing - YouTube[/ame]

Not fished the lake concerned, but found a couple of similar inland seas with similar fish in lesser numbers in my 1990s / early 2000s travels on the Argentine-Chile border. Another lake, much smaller, briefly produced some tremendous browns, then lost its spawning waters through a minor local natural catastrophe and so saw the great fish eating out their earlier progeny, becoming the most incredible-looking cannibals as they did so before dying out.

On my last visit to the lake, a three-day fish-less one, I found the sun-bleached and -whitened skull of what must have been a 20-plus brown on a boulder beach I was walking and fishing. The skull is on my desk in front of me now: think alligator or dinosaur with hundreds of long backward-curving teeth in the great, long, hugely misshapen jaws, on the roof of the mouth and on its tongue - so many and so big that the fish would not have been able to shut its mouth in the final weeks before eventually starving to death, having run out of 2- to 10-pound or so versions of itself to eat. True dog eat dog.

 

[Paul Boote]

Still looking at those curved needle- / snake fang-like teeth. I blame it on the local lager - Whose fault is your lager hangover? Blame it on migrating birds | Life and style | The Observer

Overnight a pal, ex Wales now working and living in the Oxford - Cotswold area, who fished with me down there for three weeks in the late 1990s and who looks in here, sent me an email titled "Nice pooch" with two links and a "Trout still wanting to fight it out on the bank, I see.".

[ame=http://youtu.be/gnuRpEX7LtI]Estancia Rio Pelke Fly fishing - YouTube[/ame]

[ame=http://youtu.be/wbqOSAUq_A8]Rio Pelke Lodge, paraíso truchero - YouTube[/ame]

Indeed.

He had fished another spring-fed stream not far from the one featured above (a stream that I had fished a couple of times in the mid 1990s before it became a fishing lodge) with me on that trip, on which he had a near-7-pound brown leap out of the water, land on the opposite bank, kick itself well back into its grassy meadow and beach itself there, forcing me to wade the stream and retrieve the fish for him.

Definitely the local Quilmes lager.

 

[Paul Boote]

"Dangerous" large bird often seen running away from you at very high speed and into the far distance on the rivers featured above now prowling Hertfordshire and getting the Daily Telegraph worried. Found one of these killed by a Puma on one occasion - great flytying materials....

Dangerous giant bird on the loose in Hertfordshire countryside - Telegraph

 

[geoffmaynard]

Ah, well. We've got pumas on the Wye, they'll soon sort it out

 

[Paul Boote]

See that the Rural Kill Will Cure Crew have "Chris(tine) Reah" in their sights.

Chris the runaway rhea facing death threats - Telegraph

As the person said at the end of the piece and which I very nearly posted here yesterday, you need one of these - http://images.nationalgeographic.co...orse-rider-boleadoras-marden_8016_990x742.jpg (today it would an Indian-descended gauco - with a set of boleadoras, the small sized, two-weight avestrucera (ave = bird) or ñanducera boleadora ("nandu" being the local Argentine name for the rhea), the larger three-weighted version being used historically for wild guanaco llamas and escaped-from-the-Spanish-Conquistadores horses.

Seen it done several times by gauchos, both at country rodeo gatherings and for real in the field. Amazing.