The island of Tierra del Fuego, in the Argentine Patagonia, is famous among fly fishermen, for the sea trout of the majestic Rio Grande, but little is known about the fishing in the interior of the island. RESIDENTS, shows us that this place, still little explored at the End of the World, has much to offer.
The south of Argentine TDF – the (perhaps blessedly) non-sea trout streams in the forests around Lago Tolhuin then those as you move south and west through spectacular, witch-hatted, ice-sparkling Middle Earth mountains to Ushuaia (the port town pictured in the movie) hold some very fine trout (caught on biggish rubberlegs nymphs, Buggers, Mice, mostly), but have been much altered over the past 20 years by a sudden explosion in numbers of the Canadian beaver that were introduced to the island in the 1940s to be farmed for a furcoat trade that was very soon to tank. Huge tracts of fine, very slow-growing forests of Antarctic beech have been felled by the critters and turned into glutinous deadfall marsh, streams become lakes behind dams, with the trout still present (judging from the film) but quite often a pretty “gluey” experience for any angler trying to get at them (besides, I’m a rivers man myself).
Some fine trout water on the Chilean side of TDF too, but, again, waters that require an angler to “work” merely to access them, only two that I encountered offering consistent though sporadic small fly, dry and nymph fishing. Some TDF rivers hold rainbows and brookies, too – there’s a run on the famous Rio Grande in the north, in its upper-middle reaches, that’s not called “Rainbow Alley” for nothing.
The main problem, as I see it, of fishing resident trout on TDF is your own mental attitude: the recurring nagging thought that “Here I am taking some pretty nasty weather, though catching a few very nice and pretty a little above average trout, but just a shortish distance north from here there are three or four rivers [which I have fished, that’s the nightmare] that are almost certainly absolutely heaving with huge sea-trout….”
Nothing less than Piscatorial 19th Nervous Breakdown material!