LAGO RODRIGUEZ

The following article (in an edited version) appeared in the February issue of The Complete Fly Fisherman magazine. It is Dean Riphagen’s account of the reconnaissance trip undertaken to Lago Rodriguez by Dean, Tom Lewin and four Frontier Fly Fishing clients.

I’ve had the great privilege of fishing many of the world’s most famous fly-fishing destinations, and while many, like New Zealand, have lived up to their reputations, others haven’t. Lago Rodriguez, also known as Jurassic Lake by some anglers, was an Argentinean lake (and a small stream) I’d recently read and heard much about, and when we put our reconnaissance trip together to this venue, there was always the niggling concern in the back of our minds that the venue might not live up to our expectations. How wrong we were! The venue not only lived up to our expectations but exceeded them beyond our wildest dreams.

Prior to our departure for the lake from El Calafate in southern Argentina, we’d overnighted in Argentina’s wonderful capital, Buenos Aires. If there is one thing that I’ve learnt to appreciate over the years about fishing trips, it’s that they are not all about the fishing: sure the fishing is important, but it’s the holistic journey that’s the most important. A trip to Lago Rodriguez is a special journey: aside from trout fishing that will blow your mind, you get to see a truly beautiful part of the world and interact with people that are both friendly and helpful. But back to the fishing ….    

The Ford- and two Toyota pick-ups bumped and ground their way across the stark landscape, the guides careful to take the journey slowly. Weeks earlier they had ruined three trailers attempting to get an inflatable raft to the tented camp at the lakeside. Once the vehicles had turned off the sealed road, the road becomes a tortuous track across a barren plateau before descending to the lake shore. The final twenty kilometres take a grinding three hours! This, along with the fact that the lake is privately owned, ensures that the fishing is what it is, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Southern Argentina, and specifically the Tierra del Fuego region, falls within the latitudes known as the Roaring Forties, and the wind is an ever-present consideration for anglers armed with fly-rods. Fortunately Lago Rodriguez lies just north of this windy belt, although our first sighting of the water was of a lake streaked with white caps. The wind lasted only a day, and we were then blessed with a further three days of idyllic conditions for fly-fishing. After about an hour and a half of negotiating the dirt track in low ratio, four wheel drive, we first caught a glimpse of the stream that feeds the lake. I would guess that at this point we were probably 20 kilometres above the lake, and there was probably another ten kilometres of stream above the spot where we forded it in the trucks. The water was crystal clear and in many ways resembled the Nevis River near Cromwell in New Zealand. Every one of the anglers present on the trip was out of the vehicles in a flash, making their way as fast as possible to check the stream out. We spotted a few small fish and one that I would consider “reasonable”, but certainly nothing to get the heart racing. It was only after the pick-up trucks had forded the river that we caught a small glimpse of what was in store for us. Just after fording the stream and driving along  the track that ran parallel to it, we saw something in the stream which we wanted to believe was a trout, but were too embarrassed to ask the guide for fear that he’d say something like, “No ways man, that’s way too big for a fish in a small stream like this.” But when someone did pipe up and ask him whether it was a fish, he confirmed it was. It was then that we realised just what we would be casting to in the days to come.