The Serrano, that’s the one in the Torres del Paine area that Ernie Schweibert wrote about in his “A River For Christmas” (it produced smallish sea-trout for him) and I discussed with him when we met at Hosteria San Huberto on Argentina’s Malleo in March 1994. In due turn I tried the river a few years later – more to see the world-famous Torres than to fish – and caught sea-trout (not that many of them) to around the same 3 to 5 pounds. No King salmon, though there was talk of a few being seen and occasionally caught in the river and other southern Chilean rivers back then, but NOW…
I wonder if anyone found that no-name, nothing-much-too-look-at smallish river of the Chilean Far South that a Welsh pal and I fished on a very late 1990s trip that heaved with 5 to 18-pound steelhead (three of the latter size and two at 16 and 17) in its lower reaches when we just happened to hit it right after a tip-off by a nonagenarian Chilean estanciero I had met taking afternoon tea with a dozen-strong selection of his large, multi-generation family at the ranch on the lower Gallegos river that ninety-odd years before Butch and Sundance had dined at one evening with its British owners before riding off the next morning to rob the bank in town. That lovely old Chilean gentleman, privately educated in England, had told me in March 1997 “You really ought to try the stream on our ‘bit’ of land, you know … our gauchos use every means possible to take the “Plateados” (roughly – the (silver)-plated ones) when they come.”
Hmm…., I thought to myself then.
So, a couple of years later…..
I was fishing with that same Welshman only yesterday, for grayling, in southern England. We were speaking, glasss of hot, mulled red wine in hand, after a morning’s fishing, at a families and kids and their friends bankside barbecue, of those steelhead (and of Southern Hemisphere sea-trout) and turning our two fishing companions green with envy, great old friends of his, but then we always make a point of doing this when we’re fishing with them, as “They deserve it”, he tells me….
The Serrano, that’s the one in the Torres del Paine area that Ernie Schweibert wrote about in his “A River For Christmas” (it produced smallish sea-trout for him) and I discussed with him when we met at Hosteria San Huberto on Argentina’s Malleo in March 1994. In due turn I tried the river a few years later – more to see the world-famous Torres than to fish – and caught sea-trout (not that many of them) to around the same 3 to 5 pounds. No King salmon, though there was talk of a few being seen and occasionally caught in the river and other southern Chilean rivers back then, but NOW…
I wonder if anyone found that no-name, nothing-much-too-look-at smallish river of the Chilean Far South that a Welsh pal and I fished on a very late 1990s trip that heaved with 5 to 18-pound steelhead (three of the latter size and two at 16 and 17) in its lower reaches when we just happened to hit it right after a tip-off by a nonagenarian Chilean estanciero I had met taking afternoon tea with a dozen-strong selection of his large, multi-generation family at the ranch on the lower Gallegos river that ninety-odd years before Butch and Sundance had dined at one evening with its British owners before riding off the next morning to rob the bank in town. That lovely old Chilean gentleman, privately educated in England, had told me in March 1997 “You really ought to try the stream on our ‘bit’ of land, you know … our gauchos use every means possible to take the “Plateados” (roughly – the (silver)-plated ones) when they come.”
Hmm…., I thought to myself then.
So, a couple of years later…..
I was fishing with that same Welshman only yesterday, for grayling, in southern England. We were speaking, glasss of hot, mulled red wine in hand, after a morning’s fishing, at a families and kids and their friends bankside barbecue, of those steelhead (and of Southern Hemisphere sea-trout) and turning our two fishing companions green with envy, great old friends of his, but then we always make a point of doing this when we’re fishing with them, as “They deserve it”, he tells me….