Monday, July 16 was a national holiday in our country and consequently we had 3 consecutive day offs on that weekend. I had been wondering if I would go fishing in those holidays. We had heavy rain every day, which is the norm in the end of the rainy season, meaning that rivers might be too high to fish. Also, I was tired. My father fell ill and he has been in hospital since last November. My mother died 10 years ago and he lives alone. I go to the hospital and see him every two weeks, alternately with my younger brother so that either my brother or I see my father every weekend. There are things that have to be done for him, but it is especially hard for me to see my old man, who taught me the joy of fishing, who looked so mighty and powerful that it seemed as if nothing could beat him when I was a kid, deteriorating physically and mentally. I was also busy with work. So, I was tired, but the urges for fishing, the thought of me standing in a cool mountain stream where iwana dwell, finally overcame my laziness.
I left home in the evening of Friday. It was raining hard on my way, but it stopped raining before I bought a day’s fishing license at a convenience store close to mountains around midnight. I parked at a roadside opening and took a nap in the car.
In the morning, it was drizzling again. The water was very high in most of the stretches of the river that I had intended to fish. I first went to the gate of the logging road along a tributary stream, but there was a car, which apparently belonged to a fisherman, in front of the gate.
A few hundred meters below the gate, there was a campsite along the stream, where the stream is rather wide open and seemed fishable.

I set a bead head hare’s ear and an indicator and began fishing. Soon after that, I saw the car parked at the gate running away downstream, but I kept fishing anyways.
The first fish was amago.

Next, amago again, good size for this species.

I was told this was an iwana stream, so it was a bit surprising. The third was finally iwana; a nice one too.

Then, I added another small iwana. Fish were all very active. The indicator was violently pulled upstream every time. Perhaps they hadn’t fed for a while because of very high water. I fished less than a hundred meters before the open fishable water ended at the upper end of the campsite. Further upstream, the stream narrowed and there was no flat water to put in the nymph. I understood the person of the car at the gate had also given up fishing because of the high water.
On a map, I looked for smaller creeks where the water level might decrease faster, and headed for one which seemed rather promising. I pulled over at an opening beside the logging road along the creek, and walked through cedar woods to the stream.

The water looked good, and I changed the nymph to a dry fly.

The creek was filled with many innocent tiny amago, but there was no response from good fish. Again, I decided to go to another stream.
The water was still high in the next creek and it was barely fishable.

Nevertheless, small iwana eagerly snatched my offering in occasional slow flat water created by boulders in the periphery of the stream.

This was the biggest fish I caught in this stream. The weather finally cleared up.

That night, I stayed at “Re-Rise”, a fly fisher’s inn. The place was rather crowded because there was a fly fishing school held by a fly fishing pro shop.

Although everybody hoped otherwise, it rained hard again during the night and rivers were refilled with too much water that had lowered close to fishable levels in the previous day.
Some people who stayed in Re-Rise went to a nearby fishing pond in the next day. I drove around all day long looking for any fishable streams, though even very small streams were blown out and I couldn’t wave a rod on this day.

On the last day, most of the streams were still difficult to fish. I went to a small creek following a suggestion by Nahuji-san, the owner of the lodge. The creek rushes down on a steep slope of a mountain that divides two major river drainages. Although the weather was finally very fine, it was dark in the creek because of tall cedar woods.

The water of the creek there had already lowered enough for dry fly fishing. Iwana were very active but they were all small.

There must be bigger fish that spawned these small ones, since the creek is not stocked in this stretch, which is divided by a dam from the lower part, but I couldn’t see even a hint of larger fish.
Nahuji-san told me that the iwana in this upper stretch of the creek belong to a different strain and that the color pattern of the body is different from that of the iwana in the main drainage.

He says the top of the mountain is marshy grassland which is the headwater of both this creek and another creek that drains into the other watershed and the iwana of the upper stretch of this creek came over from the other side of the mountain. But I wasn’t sure if iwana I caught were different from the ones in the main stem of the stream.

I called it a day and headed home at around noon to avoid the traffic congestion of the evening of the last day of the consecutive holidays. Fishing was certainly slow this time, but it was at least a thousand times better than staying home and watching TV.

Satoshi