One Man’s River

In a garage studio on a cliff above the Ahaura River, Johnny Groome stepped back from his easel and regarded the canvas with a critical eye. A heavily-timbered stag, trotting up an alpine game trail and pausing momentarily to glance over its massive shoulder, looked back at him from the unfinished painting with a mixture of curiosity and defiance.

“Enough work for today,” Johnny said, stabbing his brushes into a tin of turpentine. “Let’s go for a fish. I’ll show you my best river in the world.”

I came to see him about just that, my curiosity piqued by Johnny’s book Arnold Gold, his stories about large flies and amazing Coloburiscus hatches, and the New Zealand river that no one else seemed to care about. In my exploratory forays to the West Coast I had already looked at the Arnold River near Greymouth some years ago but dismissed it after a cursory glance. It seemed too hard: intimidating fast water, so dark it was impossible to look into, hemmed in and overhung with willows, and impenetrable thickets of blackberries and brambles blocking off all access like bales of barbed wire. I went on to Reefton instead. This, Johnny was now telling me, was the mistake everyone made.

“There are three types of trout waters on the Coast,” Johnny commented as we drove down to the river. “Your lowland waters like La Fontaine and all the spring creeks, the backcountry rock-and-boulder type everyone goes for, and then it’s the Arnold which I prefer above any other.”

Unlike most other trout rivers on the Coast—all of them rain-fed and thus prone to frequent and at times cataclysmic floods—the Arnold flows out of the large Lake Brunner and is thus uncommonly stable. This is apparent when you upturn one of the stones which cobble the riverbed, black with algae and trailing tendrils of weeds, and absolutely teeming with aquatic insects. But blink and you miss most of them because the water-blaster current washes them away instantly.

“One time I set up a fine-mesh sampling net and then moved a few stones above it,” Johnny recalled. “The net yielded over 1000 critters, mainly net-building caddis and Coloburiscus nymphs. I try not to do this too often because, really, the bottom here is so old, undisturbed and densely populated, you pick up a stone and you instantly want to put it back, feeling guilty about the havoc you’ve caused.”

This aquatic ecosystem—stable, long-established and unaffected by the heaviest of deluges—makes the Arnold such a unique trout fishery. “It is a haven for brown trout,” Johnny said. “There is an overabundance of food here, unlimited shelter and almost no disturbance from anglers. The numbers of fish must be experienced to be believed. I have pulled out up to 20 good fish from a patch of river the size of my kitchen. Based on my catch rates I’d guesstimate the numbers at 500 fish per kilometre, in places perhaps even more. This surely must be the highest density of trout anywhere in this country.”

None of it was immediately apparent as we walked upstream from the highway bridge and along the smaller channel of the main river called the Left Fork. If anything, my old impressions were reconfirmed. Absolutely no room to cast, arse-up territory wading and the worst of all, no sign of fish. The water is stained brown by the forest tannins and it runs over black bottom, frequently frothing into whitewater. No hope in hell to spot a trout, not even with a painter’s visual acuity like Johnny’s.

“What makes the Arnold such a Cinderella of a river is that it is a blind-fishing water in the region known for its sight-fishing,” he points out. “You try to spot fish here, you’ll fail almost every time. Like in those famous English streams, you have to fish the water, but here the trout are packed so tight you need to cover every square inch of the bottom.”

Easier said than done. I watched Johnny wade into the river at a small opening among the willows. The current instantly grabbed his legs as if to take him down, but he made confident if slow progress into the riffle with short shuffling steps. You won’t find his casts in any book or demonstration video. They are mongrelised Spey flicks which rely on the current to load the rod, because even a half backcast would result in a sure snag in the willows. But though they are not pretty, the casts are effective. Not three plops of a heavy nymph later, Johnny was hooked to a vigorous trout which tore downstream in a blur of gold.

There was a long but furious stalemate, a seesaw of give and take with neither man nor the fish giving in. Johnny, his legs trembling against the relentless current, and with his feet planted on the bottom as slippery as banana skins, was reluctant to follow downstream where the flow is even faster and deeper. The trout, strong from a life spent in this muscular water, used the current like a seasoned wakeboarder.

But clearly Johnny is an old hand at this. Slowly he brought the fish in, guiding it through an obstacle course of sunken sticks and trailing branches, mindful of all the overhead line hazards. He released the fish midstream, the barbless hook making it an easy pluck. “Very impressive,” I yelled, but Johnny didn’t hear me. With another of those mongrel casts he was hooked into a second trout, almost in the same spot.

This went on for a while, with fish after fish from barely a few square metres of fast water, until Johnny motioned me in to have a turn. My own rod was rigged up for dry fly so I borrowed his, clearly a proven set-up. It was a #7–8 weight walloper, with a long thick leader, a single bomb of a caddis nymph and no indicator. Casting with it felt like wielding a fireman’s axe. But that’s the easy part.

The current is so swift you have to start stripping the line even before the fly hits the water or you’ll never catch up on its drift and feel the take. This makes for athletic and furiously fast fishing. I lobbed two dozen such casts, stripping the line like a madman, but nothing happened.

“You must’ve caught them all,” I quip. “There are no fish here anymore.” It was good I didn’t bet on it. Johnny went back in, made a couple of his ugly casts and his axe of a rod was bent double again. Then again. Clearly no shortage of fish—more a shortcoming in my angling skills.

“There is a bit of a knack to it,” observed Johnny. “But once you get it, you can confidently catch fish here any time. We regularly average 10–20 fish every day, depending only on how much time you want to put into it. You can see what a tremendous resource the Arnold is. A backcountry river may take a few days to recover before it’s worth fishing again. Here you can come every day of the year and always find fish.”

I was quietly hanging out for some dry fly action as Johnny extolled how the Coloburiscus hatches used to be so consistent here you could fish them all day, seeing trout rising in nose-to-tail lines to mayflies so large you could just about hear their wings flapping as they came off the water. A few duns were fluttering about, rising in a slow and stately manner as befits their size, but we saw no trout intercepting them.

Finally, “Ah, there’s one!” Johnny froze, then slowly backed off from the edge, pointing to a trout that had just risen against our side of the bank. I got down on my knees, edged in closer and watched. The fish rose again and I had its position pin-pointed. “This is more like it,” I thought, “here I am at home and confident again.”

The fish ignored the first two casts, Johnny’s upside-down Coloburiscus imitation bouncing down the fast and narrow feedline, but the third time around there was a quick splash, then the familiar heaviness on the line as I lifted the rod.

The fight was rodeo-short because I held the fish up near the surface and kept it splashing, not letting it run for the fear of all the snags and branches. The trout was maybe four pounds, whisky gold and speckled like a gem. It vanished the instant I released it, the water into which it returned black again and seemingly fishless.

I sat in the tall grass of the bank, silently relishing that inner glow that comes when you’ve worked for a fish long and hard, and then have it all happen just perfectly—the sighting, the cast, the fight and release—like a miniature lifetime condensed into a few moments.

With a wide sweeping gesture, Johnny announced: “This is where they want to put the artificial kayak course, with a 300 metre concrete flume flushed at will to a dialled-in grade of whitewater. And over there they plan a huge regulation pond. The new power station is supposed to go in further upstream.”

It would be an understatement to say that Johnny Groome is pissed off. The river on which he spent his childhood, which he fished regularly and frequently over the past 28 years, is about to be ruined and the process is well advanced. In another hare-brained scheme of trading world-class trout for cheap megawatts, a power company has been given the go-ahead to develop a hydro project which will effectively spell the end of the Arnold ecosystem and its fishery as it is now.

Oddly enough, all the traditional defendants of wild rivers seemed to have given up on the Arnold. The Fish and Game did so ostensibly to focus on other more important river-saving battles, of which there are no shortage. The whitewater kayakers entered a pact with the Devil and got their concrete slalom course as a sweetener. This left only Johnny willing to fight, and it also left him raving mad because, as he sees it, no one knows the river as well as he does and so no one else knows what they are about to lose.

Johnny Groome took the power company to court, into a David-and-Goliath confrontation. But for all his passion and knowledge of riverine ecology he is also trustful and innocent, and the real-life Grisham characters of the corporate world made short work of cutting him down. They cited technicalities and befuddled the key issues in swathes of legalese. His case was trivialised, papers misfiled, his arguments refuted by people with dubious motives and unclear allegiances. Which is why Johnny wrote and self-published Arnold Gold, and why he is now filming a DVD to show the true nature of the river and its remarkable ecosystem.

“They all marginalise the Arnold, saying that the fish numbers are insignificant,” he says. “Well, the point is, if you transplanted the river say to England, among all those famous creeks and hallowed waters of fly fishing, the Arnold would overshadow them all.

“The water clarity is low here and so any drift-dive fish-count gives a seriously false reading. Firstly, most of the time you’re in whitewater, trying not to drown or get strained against trees and snags. Then, almost all the fish will be gone before you can get close enough to see and count them. I know this because I’ve tried to film them underwater and it’s impossible. The visibility is only about two metres. So you can’t see the fish at all. But you can catch them.” Watching Johnny do just that, I have no doubt his river holds an enormous amount of fish.

Come and fish the Arnold. Johnny Groome would love you to. Unlike the rest of us, so secretive about our rivers, he wants everyone to know about his favourite water because this may be just about the only way he can protect it from ruin. For now, the Arnold remains one of the world’s best trout fishing rivers most anglers have never heard about.

I once lived in the Swiss Alps, where I came across the idea of hausberg, or the home mountain. Local tradition has it that each person needs a mountain with which they have a particularly deep and personal affinity. It is a hideaway where you play as a child, and where later you seek solitude during life’s tempests. A place to share with your loved ones and only the closest of friends. A landmark which springs to mind when you think of home; the epicentre of your personal heartland.

I used to climb mountains, and still ski them, but I’m more drawn to the idea of a home river. Most of us choose one, but in rare cases the river does the choosing. It seems to me that the Arnold could not have chosen a more devout defender.

Johnny’s book Arnold Gold, is available from FlyLife. Phone 03 6260 2409 www.flylife.com.au