FUNNY WHAT STICKS WITH YOU

CHAPTER ONE

The Best Day’s Fishing

Someone asked me once about the best day’s fishing I’d ever had. You’d think that would be an easy question. If you’ve spent enough time fishing, there should be one that stands out. The day you landed the biggest trout. The day everything was feeding. The day you found that perfect bit of water nobody else seemed to know about. But strangely enough, that’s not where my mind went. I couldn’t tell you exactly how many fish we caught that day. I couldn’t tell you what every one weighed. I probably couldn’t even tell you what fly we were using. But I remember the morning. I remember standing beside a horse, tightening the girth and looking at the fly rod strapped safely amongst the gear. I remember that feeling you get when you’ve got an entire day ahead of you and absolutely no idea how it’s going to unfold.

I remember swinging into the saddle. And I remember riding away. The road disappeared behind us, the river appeared beside us, and suddenly there wasn’t much else that mattered. Later, I remember somebody pulling their horse up. “There’s one.” Everybody stopped. Somewhere below us, sitting quietly in the current, was a trout. Five minutes earlier we’d been horse riders. Now we were fishermen.

Later again, I remember smoke from the fire drifting through the trees. Food cooking. Horses resting nearby. Someone taking the piss out of somebody else’s casting. And I remember looking upstream after lunch. There was another bend. We hadn’t seen what was around it yet. So we packed everything up, put our feet back in the stirrups and carried on.

Funny what sticks with you. Because when I think about that day now, I realise the fishing wasn’t actually the whole point. It was the excuse. An excuse to saddle a horse, pack a fly rod, and disappear up a river for the day.

CHAPTER TWO

Before the First Cast

Every good fishing story starts before anybody actually goes fishing.

There’s that little bit of anticipation beforehand. The weather gets checked. Then checked again. Someone starts talking about river levels. Another person has a theory about which fly is going to work. Gear gets packed. Then repacked. Something important will almost certainly be forgotten. And eventually, you arrive.

Except today, there’s something different waiting for you. A horse. That’s when you realise this isn’t going to be an ordinary day’s fishing. The horses are saddled, the gear gets sorted and the rods are packed carefully. You meet the horse that’s going to carry you into the country. Maybe you’re an experienced rider. Maybe you’ve only ridden a handful of times. Maybe it’s been twenty years since you’ve been anywhere near a saddle. That’s alright. There’s no rush. You get comfortable. Learn your horse. Figure each other out. And then, one by one, the horses start moving. The sound of hooves replaces the noise of getting ready. The gear is packed. The rods are with us. Somewhere ahead, there’s a river waiting.

The adventure begins at walking pace. There’s something nice about that.

CHAPTER THREE

Travelling at Horse Speed

We spend a lot of our lives trying to get somewhere faster. Cars. Planes. Phones. Notifications. Everything designed to save us another five minutes. A horse doesn’t care about any of that. A horse travels at horse speed. And after a while, so do you. At first, you’re probably still thinking about where you’re going. How long until the fishing starts? What’s around the corner? How far are we riding? Then something changes.

You stop worrying about getting there. You start noticing where you are. The sound of the river. The temperature changing as you ride beneath the trees. A fantail following the horses for a while. The creak of leather. Hooves hitting stone. Your horse’s ears flicking backwards occasionally to check what you’re doing up there.

Before long, you start looking into the water as you ride. Every dark shape becomes suspicious. Every bit of slower water deserves a second look. You’re not thinking about how far there is to go anymore. You’re watching the river. Then somebody quietly says it. “Fish.” Everything stops.

CHAPTER FOUR

The First Fish

Spotting a trout from horseback does something strange to a group of otherwise sensible adults. Conversation stops. Everybody stares at the same patch of water.

“Where?”

“Beside that rock.”

“What rock?”

“The big one.”

“They're all bloody big.”

“See the white bit of water?”

“No.”

“Right underneath it.”

And then you see him. A shadow. Then a movement. There he is. Holding in the current. Completely unaware that several people sitting on horses above him have suddenly made him the most important creature in New Zealand. Now comes the interesting part. How do we get a fly to him? We find somewhere suitable for the horses. Climb down. Get the rod out. And begin negotiating our way into position. There's a reason fishermen spend so much time staring at water. You start reading it. Where's the current? Where will the fly land? Where will it drift? Can we get close without spooking him? Eventually someone is ready. Line comes off the reel. The rod lifts.First cast. Too short. Second cast. Better. Third cast. Right through the feeding lane. Everyone watches. Nothing. Again.

CHAPTER FIVE

One More Cast

We spend a lot of our lives trying to get somewhere faster. Cars. Planes. Phones. Notifications. Everything designed to save us another five minutes. A horse doesn’t care about any of that. A horse travels at horse speed. And after a while, so do you.

At first, you’re probably still thinking about where you’re going. How long until the fishing starts? What’s around the corner? How far are we riding?

Then something changes.

You stop worrying about getting there. You start noticing where you are. The sound of the river. The temperature changing as you ride beneath the trees. A fantail following the horses for a while. The creak of leather. Hooves hitting stone. Your horse’s ears flicking backwards occasionally to check what you’re doing up there. Before long, you start looking into the water as you ride. Every dark shape becomes suspicious. Every bit of slower water deserves a second look. You’re not thinking about how far there is to go anymore. You’re watching the river. Then somebody quietly says it.

“Fish.”

Everything stops.

CHAPTER SIX

The Horses

The horses are what change the whole day. Without them, you’re walking, and when you’re walking you’re always doing the quiet calculation that fishermen know well. How far have we come? How far have we got to walk back? Is that next bend really worth another kilometre? On horseback, those questions seem to matter a little less. The country opens up and distance begins to feel different. You settle into the saddle and let four legs do the travelling while the horse picks its way along the track, across uneven ground and through the river. Places that might have seemed just a little too far on foot suddenly become part of the day. There’s something else that happens along the way, too. You start trusting the animal underneath you.

At the beginning of the morning, it was simply the horse. You climbed aboard, gathered the reins and hoped the two of you might come to some sort of understanding. But after a few hours together, it becomes your horse. You begin to notice the little things. The way they walk and the places they like to stop. There’s the horse that thinks its rightful place is at the front of the group and another that’s perfectly content following behind. One notices absolutely everything, while another seems convinced that stopping for something to eat is a far more sensible use of the day than chasing trout up a river. Without really noticing when it happened, you start talking to them. A quiet “good boy” after crossing the river. A bit of encouragement heading up a bank. Maybe a few words when they’ve decided that patch of grass is worth stopping the entire expedition for.

By lunchtime, you’ve probably forgotten that only a few hours earlier you were strangers. And by the time the horses finally turn towards home, tired legs hanging comfortably in the stirrups and the river slowly disappearing behind you, you find yourself reaching down to give your horse a pat on the neck. “Thanks, mate. ”That’s the thing about horses. They sneak up on you a bit.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Somewhere Good for Lunch

Eventually, fishing becomes less important than food. After a few hours in the saddle and enough casts to have lost count, we start looking for somewhere to stop.Not a restaurant or a picnic table. Just somewhere that looks right. A flat bit beside the river, a little shelter, enough room for the horses and a view worth sitting in front of for a while.

“That’ll do.”

We climb down, sort the horses and unload what we need. Before long, somebody has the fire going and smoke is drifting through the trees. There’s an art to sitting beside a fire after spending half a day outside. Nobody needs entertaining. Nobody needs Wi-Fi. You just sit with your boots stretched towards them warmth, watching the river move past while the food begins to cook. Someone makes a coffee, and before long the stories begin.

Naturally, the fish from earlier gets discussed. Then it gets discussed again. By the third telling it has somehow gained roughly two pounds. Someone gets blamed for losing another one, while someone else maintains it was never properly hooked anyway. There’s a bit of rubbish talked. There always is.

But eventually the conversation slows. The food is finished, the coffee cups are nearly empty and, for a few minutes, everyone just sits there. The fire crackles beside us, the river carries on downstream and the horses wait quietly nearby. Nobody seems particularly interested in getting moving again. There aren’t many places left where doing absolutely nothing feels like exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. This is one of them.

CHAPTER EIGHT

No Signal

At some point during the day, you might pull your phone out. Probably to take a photo. And that’s when you notice something. Maybe there’s no signal. Maybe there is. It doesn’t really matter, because you haven’t been looking at it anyway. You’ve been busy. Not busy in the way we normally use the word. There have been no emails to answer, no meetings to get to and nowhere you need to be in ten minutes.

Instead, you’ve been busy watching the water. Riding a horse. Working out how to get a fly in front of a trout. Listening to the people around you. Eating beside a fire and wondering what might be waiting around the next bend. It’s strange how quickly the world becomes small again when you take away all the things constantly trying to make it bigger.

For a few hours, life becomes remarkably simple. There’s the horse underneath you, the river beside you and a fly rod never too far away. The phone goes back into your pocket. Someone up ahead has stopped their horse and is looking into the water. “See something?” “Maybe.” And suddenly, that’s the only news anybody cares about. For now, that’s enough.

CHAPTER NINE

Around the Next Bend

There’s something dangerous about a bend in a river, you can’t see what’s beyond it, which means, naturally, you need to know. By now, we should probably be thinking about heading home, we’ve already had a good day. The horses have carried us a fair way up the river, we’ve fished some good water and nobody really needs another trout. Then somebody looks upstream. “Wonder what’s around there?” That’s usually all it takes, the horses start walking again and we follow the river around one more bend.

Sometimes there’s nothing particularly remarkable waiting for us, the river carries on as much as it did before, and you wonder why you were so determined to see it. But that’s part of fishing, you never really know until you go and have a look. Every now and then, though, you round a bend and the whole river seems to change. The trees open up, the water slows and deepens, there’s a beautiful stretch of river ahead that makes everyone sit a little straighter in the saddle. Then somebody spots a fish, a good one. Any thoughts of heading home disappear fairly quickly after that.

There’s something about rivers that keeps pulling you a little further than you intended to go, perhaps it’s the possibility that the next pool will be better than the last, or simply the fact that you can’t see what’s waiting until you get there. Either way, we’re glad we kept going.

Life can be funny like that, some of the best places are just beyond the point where you nearly turned around.

CHAPTER TEN

The One That Got Away

At some point during the day, you might pull your phone out. Probably to take a photo. And that’s when you notice something. Maybe there’s no signal. Maybe there is. It doesn’t really matter, because you haven’t been looking at it anyway. You’ve been busy. Not busy in the way we normally use the word. There have been no emails to answer, no meetings to get to and nowhere you need to be in ten minutes.

Instead, you’ve been busy watching the water. Riding a horse. Working out how to get a fly in front of a trout. Listening to the people around you. Eating beside a fire and wondering what might be waiting around the next bend.

It’s strange how quickly the world becomes small again when you take away all the things constantly trying to make it bigger. For a few hours, life becomes remarkably simple. There’s the horse underneath you, the river beside you and a fly rod never too fa away. The phone goes back into your pocket. Someone up ahead has stopped their horse and is looking into the water. “See something?” “Maybe.” And suddenly, that’s the only news anybody cares about. For now, that’s enough.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Turning Home

Eventually the shadows get longer, the temperature changes, and even the most optimistic fisherman has to admit it's probably time. The rods get packed away properly this time, we tighten everything on the saddles, one last look at the river, then turn the horses towards home. There's a different feeling riding back, quieter, nobody's wondering when the adventure is going to start anymore. It already happened. Your legs know you've been riding, your boots might be wet, your clothes smell like smoke, there's dirt where there wasn't dirt this morning. Maybe there's a fish photo on your phone, maybe there isn't, nobody seems particularly bothered. The horses know they're heading home, their walk changes slightly, and we let them carry us back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

What You Take Home

Eventually we'll arrive back where we started, you'll climb out of the saddle, probably slightly less gracefully than you climbed into it that morning, and you'll give your horse a pat. Gear gets unloaded, rods get put away, someone finds the thing they thought they'd lost six hours earlier, and just like that, the day is finished. Except it isn't really, because the good ones come home with you.

A week later you'll remember something somebody said beside the fire, a month later you'll see a horse somewhere and think about yours, next time you're standing beside a river you'll remember that fish sitting below the bank. And years from now someone might ask: “What was the best day's fishing you've ever had? You'll probably stop for a second, because you won't remember exactly how many fish you caught. But you'll remember riding up the river, you'll remember spotting trout from horseback, you'll remember climbing down for one more cast, you'll remember smoke coming off the fire. You'll remember the yarns, you'll remember the horse that carried you there, and you'll remember looking around one last bend... just because you could.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Funny What Sticks With You

Maybe that’s what adventure actually is. We tend to think it has to involve doing something dangerous, travelling halfway around the world or finally ticking something off a bucket list, but perhaps adventure can be much simpler than that. Maybe it’s just spending a day a little differently from the way you normally would. Going somewhere slowly, with no particular need to hurry, letting the river make some of the decisions and having no idea whether the next cast will work, trusting the horse underneath you to carry you into country you might otherwise never see. It’s eating beside a fire with your boots stretched towards the warmth, laughing with good people about a fish that gets slightly bigger every time the story is told, looking upstream and wondering what might be waiting around the next bend. You might catch the trout of your life out there, you might not, but that was never really the promise. The promise was the day itself.

A proper day outside, with horses beneath you, a river alongside you and fly rods packed amongst the gear. Good country, a feed cooked over the fire, a few yarns and just enough unknown ahead to make you want to keep going. By the time you turn for home, you might have a photograph of a trout worth showing your mates, or you might not have a photograph at all. Years later, it probably won’t matter much. Because the best adventures don’t always leave you with the best photographs, sometimes, they leave you with a story. And funny enough, those are usually the ones that stick with you.

EPILOGUE

Your Chapter

You’ve read ours, now there’s really only one question left. What would yours look like?

Maybe you’ve been fly-fishing your entire life but have never reached the river on horseback, maybe horses have always been your thing and you’ve never held a fly rod. Perhaps you’ve done plenty of both. Or maybe you simply picked up this book, got to the end and thought, that sounds like a bloody good day out. Good, that’s exactly who this is for.

You don’t need to arrive knowing everything, and you certainly don’t need to know what the day is going to bring, you just need to be willing to come along for the ride. We’ll match you with a horse, pack the gear and point ourselves towards the river. We’ll stop when there’s something worth stopping for, have a cast when the water looks good and get the fire going when everyone starts getting hungry, then we’ll carry on. We can tell you where we’re starting, and we can give you a rough idea of where we’re going, but the bit in between? Well, that’s the adventure. And perhaps somewhere along the way there’ll be a good trout sitting quietly in the current. Perhaps someone will lose one that gets considerably bigger every time the story is told. Maybe lunch will last a little longer than planned, or we’ll ride around one more bend simply because nobody is quite ready to turn for home. We don’t really know, that’s rather the point. Because when the horses finally carry you home and somebody asks how your day was, hopefully you’ll have more to tell them than how many fish you caught. Hopefully, you’ll have a story of your own.

FISHING ON HORSEBACK

Korohe Horse Treks | Lake Taupō, New Zealand Not just another day’s fishing, not just another horse trek. A story you’ll get to tell.

Saddle up. Let’s see what’s around the next bend.