Armenia, Arpa River - Caucasus brown trout

Short fishing trip, Caucasus, Armenia

I was working in Armenia.  This country used to be part of USSR; now it is independent country, situated between Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Iran.   The entire territory of the country belongs to the watershed of the Caspian Sea.  One weekend I went fishing with my friend, local fisherman. 

On a road near Yerevan it is possible to see huge Ararat volcano with a snowy summit at the altitude of 5137 meters.

  Dry mountains on the road to Arpa River.

 Armenian villages with lush gardens look like oases surrounded by harsh mountains.

 Arpa River is swift and powerful.  The water at that day was slightly murky.  

 At the banks I had found numerous signs of high productivity of the river

 I have started to fish with floating line and a small nymph 

 One cast went too far and got to the opposite bank.  The nymph was immediately bitten by a fat frog. 

Catch and release

 The frog is unharmed.  Let's look for trout.

To be continued

Yama River, Sea of Okhotsk - 2

 When snorkeling in the clear water of Yama River, I was able to see different fish, including coho & chum salmon

 Kundzha or white-spotted charr (Salvelinus leucomaenis) can reach 12 and even 20 kg.  

This is the biggest Salmonid fish of the rivers where there are no king salmon or taimen.  

 Deep and slow side-channels are the best resting areas for coho salmon.  Dark spots on this photo are fish!

Hooked coho is often jumping (photo of Nikita Vladimirov)

 This fisherman is holding 3 rods with a coho salmon on each of them...

 Typical flybox for the rivers with Pacific salmon, charr, & Arctic grayling: bright streamers, "salmon eggs", skating patterns, caddis-fly imitations... 

Chum salmon are often resting in deep pools and bays.  This fish in the Yama is much more numerous than coho.   

 Quite often chum (left) and coho (right) form joined schools

 Yama is famous by nice size Dolly Varden charr

Yama River, Sea of Okhotsk

Yama Rivers flows into the Shelikov Bay of the Sea of Okhotsk to the west from Magadan

 The river is about 300 km long.

 The river flows through the wide valley, filled with pebbles, and forms numerous channels and islands.

 The valley is grown with sparse larch forest, has many marshy areas 

 The best fishing in the Yama River is done by floating the river by inflatable rafts. 

 Tent camp of a group of fishermen at the gravel island

 Brown bears are plentiful at the Yama banks during the salmon run

 Yama River hosts 3 (!) different species of anadromous charrs:  Dolly Varden (top), white-spotted charr (bottom), and endemic yellow-mouth charr (Levanidov's charr) - Salvelinus levanidovi.    

 Chum is the most numerous salmon of the river; the spawners number hundreds of thousands.  Most of chum are spawning 30-150 km from the sea both in the main river and in its tributaries.   

Arctic grayling in the Yama River can be huge: this 53 cm female had weight 1800 grams. 

To be continued...

New "fly" - Anti-wobbler

When working with wobbler flies (see the post dated January 12, 2010), I had made several ones with a blade put “wrong way” - it was directed to the water surface.  Here you can see "normal" wobbler-fly (bottom) and Anti-wobbler (top).

 

What did I want to get?  Just a new type of a surface skater.  When I was testing them in the water,  some of the flies with an upright blade were showing much more complicated behavior than just coming to the surface and skating.  Some of the sinking varieties during retrieve had characteristic “hunting” movements – wide sweeping action.   These were the flies of completely new type. 

The base of Anti-wobbler consists  of a hook and plastic blade; attached with 0,1 mm mono line & clear glue. The best blades are concave ones; I make them out of disposable syringes.    When the glue will be dry, you could built on this hook with a blade any fly: streamer, imitation of squid, prawn, leech, or insect larva. 

 On this simple base you could tie Anti-wobblers of 3 main types: 1- with a foam back, 2 - Matukka style with a back out of a feather,  and 3 - the simplest fly  which has only hook, blade, body & tail.   All 3 flies below imitate little Cyprinid fish; I use them for catching pelagic predators in the Amur River.    

Anti-wobbler is excellent choice for catching pink salmon in the Sea of Okhotsk, far from fresh water.

This fly was most effective on that day - yellow skinny Anti-wobbler.  

Anti-wobblers were catching pink salmon in the river as well.

 Fresh silver pink salmon often jumps when feeling a hook. 

School of salmon running up Ola River near Magadan

Sunset at the Amur River.  Anti-wobbler could be presented near the bottom, in the middle layers of water, under the surface, and on the surface as a skating fly.   

On the base of Anti-Wobbler (blade & hook) you can tie any streamer, fantasy fly, leech, or nymph. The tail is usually made out of marabou or soft synthetics, sometimes with some flashy fibers.  Comparing with normal wobbler flies, anti-wobblers do not need the buoyant foam back; many of them I make with no foam at all.  

Anti-wobbler is one of the best flies for skygazer from the Amur River.

On some days this strange fly works much better than any spinning lures.   

Fine-tuning of the Wobbler flies and Anti-wobblers is done same way: by cutting the blade.  It is necessary to get flies with a stable wiggling action on retrieve.  A good fly is not falling on one of the sides, and is not rotating even on strong current. 

There is one more option – using a floating Anti-wobbler with foam back with sinking line in shallow areas.  The line goes on the bottom, and the fly is moving above it.  This is one of the best approaches to predators of big rivers.

Lago Fagnano, Tierra del Fuego, Chile

 We are heading to the south of the Tierra del Fuego Island.  The road is literally cut in the rocks. 

Finally the long-awaited Lago Fagnano is visible from a mountain pass.  At the pass we see the first snow.  

This huge lake is 100 km long and up to 500 m deep.  In the first evening we were able to fish the lake - the wind was very mild.  I was lucky to land a very unusually looking rainbow trout. 

 The fish was very strong, rather skinny and bright silver - with no pink strips on its sides.

 About 9/10 of the Fagnano Lake belongs to Argentina; we have visited the western, Chilean part.  Here there is the lake outlet - short Rio Azopardo. 

Rio Azopardo is swift and powerful; its water is very clear.  There are rumors on huge sea-run brown trout which are caught in this stream.   The wading was tough - in most areas the stream was way too deep. 

I was able to catch a fat brook trout.  This fish is probably coming into the river out of the lake for feeding or spawning. 

 Good size rainbow trout was caught far from the bank with a nymph on a floating line

TdF: King Penguins at the Magellan Strait

 We were driving along the treeless north-western coast of the Tierra del Fuego. 

Near the road there was a nicely carved wooden sculpture of the Indians in a canoe.

We stopped at the bridge to fish the lower part of a small creek near its mouth.  For over a kilometer the stream was flowing along the sea.   

 

Small trout caught in the stream had silvery tint on the sides.  

Probably it was going out into the salt water for feeding.

From a distance I see my friends speaking with some other fishermen

These were king penguins

Two groups of these amazing birds were resting at the shore

My friend Arthur had decided to make some casts.  

The penguins did not want to watch these awkward attempts to catch something...