Most fishing trips are measured in hours. The latest adventure from Andy's Fishing Wild Cook is measured in days, nine of them, alone, on foot, deep in New Zealand's Nelson Lakes backcountry with little more than a fly rod, a stove and a willingness to live off what the land and rivers provide.
The plan, as Andy laid it out at the start of episode 601, was deliberately ambitious: follow one river, climb a range, follow another river, climb again, then cross a rocky pass around 1,800 metres before rejoining the Te Araroa trail. "This time we are definitely going to catch some fish," he said, having stocked up on flies for a stretch of famously pristine water that fly anglers travel the world to fish.
Progress was slow, and Andy was the first to laugh about it. "You can call me Andy the human snail," he joked as cars, scooters and even push bikes flew past on the last of the road, "everything is faster than me." Once off the bitumen, the pace was set by terrain rather than traffic. "Traveling by foot is very slow," he reflected, "and if you make a mistake, you pay for it."
The series' signature blend of fishing and foraging ran through the trip. Andy pointed out edible bush foods such as bullrush along the way, and for the first time ever attempted to trap a possum, rigging a simple snare baited with peanut butter near what he hoped were game trails. He was honest about his chances, conceding he had no real idea what he was looking for and that his chosen spot looked too flat and foodless to work, but the experiment spoke to the self-reliant spirit of the journey.
The fishing, when it came, fed the cook. Andy scaled, gutted and chopped a trout into a pot with noodles, miso, water and olive oil, a simple backcountry meal earned the hard way after long days on the move. He was candid, too, about the lessons of river selection, noting that a river with a huge reputation is not always the one that produces, and that without rain he might have been better staying put on water he already knew.
The back half of the trip became as much about survival logistics as fishing. With his camera repeatedly failing, Andy filmed long stretches on his phone, all while watching his power bank drain to empty and his phone battery slide toward 40 per cent with three days still to walk. He weighed a shorter route over the steep Fowler Pass against a longer, safer track, mindful that the shortcut sees barely one person a month and that a flat phone would leave him relying on his emergency beacon, something he was determined not to trigger. "If you see this video, I made it out," he told the camera.
Freezing nights, a temperamental camera and the constant arithmetic of food and battery made this far more than a fishing video. It was a portrait of genuine wilderness self-sufficiency, where a wild trout on the fly is not just sport but dinner, and where the reward for nine days of effort is the simple, hard-won satisfaction of walking out the other side.
