The gravel road that leads to Lake Emily ends at a gate with two signs. One is riddled with what appears to be two bullet holes. It reads, "Lake Emily, Fly Fishing Only." The other says "Public Access, Four Wheel Drive Track, Use At Own Risk." Lake Emily lies in the high country near the headwaters of the Ashburton Rivers and the landscape is reminiscent of Wyoming or Montana. I half expected to see mule deer in the distance. Vehicles pass with such infrequency that you could plant a lawn chair on the road and read a newspaper. By the time you got to the sports pages, you might see a farm truck on the horizon. It was my kind of place.

I came for the brook trout. In the previous weeks I caught rainbows and browns on some of the South Island's legendary rivers. The world-class rainbow and brown trout fisheries get all of the glory and attention, yet the brook trout of New Zealand is a footnote of a fish. It is overlooked and seemingly passed over in New Zealand's fly-fishing scene when compared to the heaps of literature, guide services, and angling media about rainbows and browns. Graeme Hughes, a Fish and Game Officer of the Central South Island Region said, "Not of great interest to a large percentage of anglers due to the scarcity of good sized specimens. I have shown them in glass tanks and they create quite an interest, they are the most handsome of our sportfish."

The 19th-century was the time of the transoceanic steamships and it allowed for semi-perishable goods to be transported around the globe. Trout are not native to New Zealand yet the country has thousands of coldwater rivers and creeks that make for near-perfect trout habitat. The goal of the "acclimatization" societies formed by the early European settlers was to introduce flora and fauna from their original homeland to their new homes halfway around the world. For sustenance and sporting pursuits, they relocated red deer and wild boar for hunting and trout and salmon for fishing.

Mr. A.M. Johnson, ordered the first shipment of brook trout over from San Francisco and it arrived in Christchurch in 1877. From this stock, Johnson sold brook trout fry to the Canterbury Society, the Auckland Society and the Otago Society which distributed the fish in their regions. There were numerous shipments of thousands of brook trout over in the 1880's. Many of the fertilized fish eggs were dead on arrival from the long journey but the survivors were reared and released with some success.

During this early history of trout transplanting, the brook trout was competing with introduced brown trout (from the United Kingdom via Tasmania) and rainbow trout (from California) in its new environment and it was recorded that the brook trout migrated to the headwaters of streams when occupied by other species of trout-a characteristic shared by its cousins in North America.

I left the car parked off to the side near the gate, and hiked up the two-track. In a publication of New Zealand Fish and Game it is written, "In fact the Central South Island Region probably offers the best fontinalis populations in the country, with Lake Emily being renowned as the place in New Zealand to catch a trophy." That small blurb of information was repeated from other sources with scant details. The obscurity was tantalizing.

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Copyright © James Card.