Australian fly-fishing YouTuber Andy's Fishing has ended a long absence from the platform with one of the hardest adventure-fishing trips documented on his channel: an 11-day solo walk along 217 kilometres of New Zealand's Te Araroa trail that finally produced a single 46-centimetre brown trout on the last day.
The new video, filmed around 24 February 2026, starts in the town of Picton and follows the Pelorus River track and the Richmond Alps route southbound. Andy carries a 20-kilogram pack, a fly rod and a tent, and he tells viewers the fishing will determine whether he comes out of the bush leaner than he went in. "On this trip, I do have plenty of food, but if I don't catch fish, I'm going to lose some weight," he says.
The walk is a grind. The weather changes daily, water is scarce in places, and he supplements his supplies with foraged blackberries and — in one segment — pan-fried live cicadas scooped off the trail. "You can definitely taste his protein there. A little bit like I want to say a little like prawns, but not quite. Maybe bacon. Somewhere between prawn and bacon. These are delicious," he says after eating his first one, adding later that he'd "definitely eat them again."
The host is also unusually candid about what the trip has cost him. "I've probably spent — well, I have spent — over 4,000 on this trip already without return flights and food along most of the way," he tells the camera. Rather than skip to a trailhead, he chose to walk out of town on foot. "It's the challenge of it to walk out of a town into the bush and do your own thing."
What he does not get, for most of the 217 kilometres, is a brown trout. Multiple rivers come up empty. Several do not even look the part — "not my style of river," he says of one stretch that turns out to hold the eventual trophy. The pressure builds as the end of the route approaches and a bus pickup looms. "I can't bear not catching a fish, but it's looking like we're not going to catch a fish this trip. That would be shocking," he says, before a large shape eats his fly.
Landing the fish on light tippet he guesses at three pounds, Andy is visibly rattled. "Wow. Wow. Wow. That is the biggest brown trout I've caught for a long time," he says. "It's been 200 and I think 17 kilometres to catch this fish. That is nuts." He estimates the trout at 46 centimetres and around 1.5 kilos before releasing it back into the river.
The fly that does the job is, in his words, "totally not the sort of fly you'd expect to catch" — a grasshopper stimulator pattern fished on a run he had nearly skipped altogether.
The episode closes with a direct shout-out to other walking-and-fishing YouTubers, including B Miles and Scott's Gone Walkabout. "Have you guys ever taken that long to catch such a magnificent fish and then let it go?" he asks.
For a genre that tends to reward fish-per-minute content, a 217-kilometre, 11-day wait for a single trout feels deliberately counter-trend — and it lands well. Andy is already hinting at a follow-up: "I'm going to take a few days off, have a rest, get back on the Te Araroa trail, and then hike some more."
