Fall fly fishing in Patagonia | Hatch Magazine

As I get a little older and spend more time traveling to fish for trout (which might seem silly, seeing as how I live in one of the troutiest corners of the country), I’m slowly being converted into an angler who loves to fish in the fall. Years ago, if you would have asked me how I felt about fall fishing, I would have brazenly declared that I despise fall, simply because it offered a depressing preview of winter. I hated winter, and still do. I’m not ashamed to admit that I no longer fear the autumn — the snow’s gonna fly whether I like it or not, and fall trout fishing can be downright spectacular. Yes, fall still offers a sad harbinger of things to come, but, like I said, I’m traveling more, and the worst of winter is pretty easy to escape these days.

Also, given that I’m on the road more often, fall trout fishing isn’t just relegated to those glorious Septembers and Octobers that descend upon the rivers and streams of the Rockies near my place in eastern Idaho. Having a few connections in the Southern Hemisphere really helps expand your fall-fishing worldview, and, today, if someone were to ask me where I like to fish for trout in the fall, my answer would be pretty straightforward: Patagonia in March and April.

Yeah, sure, I’ll always love the South Fork in October, or the Bighorn as the cottonwood forest goes from green to gold in mid-September. I especially love the Missouri as the weather cools and the weeds start to die off — these special western tailwaters are some of the best places to fish as summer gives way to autumn.

But, remember, the same thing happens on rivers like the Rio Baker, Rio Mogote, and Rio Blanco of Chilean Patagonia every March. Across the border in Argentina, the beasts of the Rio Limay come alive in the southern fall, and the mind-boggling minnow run of the Collon Curra happens every March when the weather cools and big lake-dwelling rainbows and browns chase migrating minnows up the river. Several years ago, a fishing buddy and I spent an entire afternoon casting flies to migrating browns and rainbows on the Collon Curra — we might have moved 150 yards in five or so hours of fishing. It was one of those days when, truly and honestly, my arms hurt from reeling in so many big trout.

In March, the calafate bushes of Patagonia bear fruit, and the region’s big browns start to match the changing foliage. Butter-tinged browns stake out likely ambush spots, and they get more aggressive as they get ready to spawn, which usually happens on Patagonia rivers in May. But in March and April, these massive fish tend to look up a bit more than your typical autum trout, and any well-cast Fat Albert tickling the bank or drifted under overhanging wood is fair game for Patagonia’s bestial European interlopers, first brought to the southern hemisphere in the 1880s.

Taping a fish on Argentina’s Rio Limay (photo: Chad Shmukler).

Some years back, while fishing the Collon Curra from Estancia Quemquemtreau in Argentina, my guide and I beached the boat and wandered up a lonely side channel that, more or less, amounted to a willow-lined slough. The willows — equally foreign to these southern waters — were glorious and golden under the autumn sun. As we slowly walked up the bank, it didn’t take long to see the nose and face of a massive brown trout gulping baetis duns that drifted slowly by its strategic lie under a streamside overhang. A few minutes later, I was shaking my head in disbelief as I held the two-foot long brown just over the water, a size 8 Chernobyl buttoned firmly to the corner of its mouth.

“Why would it even look at something so clearly out of place?” I asked my guide as we removed the big foam fly from the fish’s mouth.

“Big boy’s gotta eat,” the guide said. I suppose he was right. For as wonderful as this day was, winter wasn’t too far away.

An autumn Chilean brown trout (photo: Earl Harper).

And he was right. Not two days later, as we floated the Rio Limay, I caught two of the biggest browns of my life on successive casts. The first, a 25-inch beast, lit up the river just a few minutes after we put in, and the second, a 27-inch titan convinced me that fall fishing wasn’t all that bad. Yeah, I had to dress for the weather — no wet-wading for me on that trip. But as I cradled these massive browns before turning them loose to the Limay once again, I knew that I was changing my tune when it came to chasing autumn trout. The next morning, as my fishing partner boated a legit 30-inch brown, I was a full-on convert.

The same thing happens to the west, across the spine of the Andes in lush and wonderful Chile, where many of the rivers run to the Pacific, and where brown trout ply the waters of rainforest rivers and mountain-ringed lakes when the weather cools off in March and April. This is the season of urgency for these big trout, and they tend to eat like their lives depend on it when fall descends on Patagonia.

On Chile’s aptly named “River of Dreams,” come autumn, season-shouldered trout chase streamers and fat, foam beetle and grasshopper patterns with abandon, hoping to fatten up for the winter. The orange-tinted browns in the spring creek, located just a few footfalls from where the few anglers that have the privilege of visiting camp each week lay their heads, do the same. If you’re lucky, a mild evening storm will tickle the tops of the Blanco river valley’s mountains with snow — greeting you in the morning as you make the run up river to new fishing grounds.

Snow-tinged mountains greet anglers headed upriver to start the day on Chile’s River of Dreams (photo: Earl Harper).

And there might not be a lesser-employed, yet wonderfully under-utilized, method for stalking big browns and rainbows than slinking along the banks of an impossibly clear lake in a cata-raft. This is sight-casting at its finest, and, for some reason, these normally cautious fish tend to be much more investigative when the light gets a bit lower and the beech trees lining the lakes start to turn orange and red under the autumn sun, seemingly before your very eyes. Putting a fat Gurgler or a foam hopper pattern on a 10-foot collision course with these massive fish is a great way to watch it all happen. Sometimes, all it takes is a little twitch to convince Chile’s lake-swimming trout to blast from the water and attack a fly.

And, as fat and happy as that brown on the Collon Cura was, these lake-dwelling trout are just as impressive, and, dare I say, perhaps a bit bigger around. Featuring heavy shoulders and massive heads that match their long, bulbous bodies after a summer spent on the prowl, these lake fish are battlers.

From the scabland rivers of Argentina to the impassable rainforest rivers of Chile, fall in Patagonia is a magical time. And, as I prepare to spend two weeks in March chasing Patagonia’s wild trout in just a couple of months, I can honestly say, without remorse or regret, that I’m eagerly anticipating the arrival of fall, even if it’s a continent away.

So don’t believe me the next time my seasonal affective disorder kicks in and I tell you that I hate fall. It’s a bald-faced lie. I love fall.

And I especially love fall in Patagonia.