BROOK TROUT - Day 1 of officially fishing in Patagonia and it was amazing! The beauty, size and the fight of these Brookies are astounding. @valkyrie821 and I caught about 40 of them, despite some choppy waters.
Just a note to say thanks to everyone at El Encuentro for another fine fishing adventure. Friends here ask us why we travel so far to fish when we have rivers like the Henry’s Fork, the Madison, and the Yellowstone in our backyard. Part of it lies with the lodge itself, which substitutes comfort and sociability for architectural pretension. It’s sort of like home, with bedrooms off the living and dining rooms, except of course here you look out over the Futaleufu River and the stunning Throne of the Clouds Mountain.
Spring fishing with El Encuentro is an amazing adventure. Come prepared for big and hungry trout, and fickle weather that can range from warm and dry to wet and chilly, but which is always beautiful and dramatic.
At this time of the year we will find fish feeding in small waters such as springs and tributaries of lakes and other major rivers as well as big rivers and shoreline of big lakes.
After a sophisticated dinner and a first night at El Encuentro Lodge with a great breakfast each guide picked up his clients and headed out for fishing on different stretches of Rio Futuleufu. Rio Futaleufu is a tailwater river of a big lake at the end of a very long water system with several rivers and lakes in-between. After the dam the river is divided by EEFF in 4 sections. I fished the section 3 on this day. Starting directly in the front of the lodge.
~ January 2019 ~
The second half of our 2019 trip began an hour and a half south of the town of Esquel at a very large Estancia called The Tecka Land Company. We booked the trip through a company called El Encuentro and used their guides, which when we did it we didn’t know how fortunate we’d be having Alun Lloyd for the week.
After a week at Tecka we moved to the El Encuentro Lodge overlooking the Futaleufu River and Alerces National Park.
Blog Post: Christopher Daniel’s report – Trip November 2018
After finishing up my second visit down south to El Encuentro I realized I fell in love with Argentina even more. The culture, the food, my amazing family made up of all the staff at El Encuentro Fly Fishing Lodge and of course we can't forget about the fish.
As the fishing season gets close to the end in Patagonia, our days get colder and mountain forests turn into an amazing intense red color, mixed with white early snowed peaks. Autumn turns the scenery into a wonder worth experiencing.
Saludos from the south of Patagonia, we are excited to be at the start of the 2018-19 fishing season! We have a great team lined up this year for what is showing promise to be our best season to date! Most of the same staff you have come to know over the last years are still with us and we’ve added a few new people as well.
Apparently, there's more plastic in the ocean than fish. And the amount is set to treble in a decade unless we stop tipping our packaging into it.
No mention about the fate of our rivers, I note. But I guess the same holds true. We must stop throwing our single-use plastic containers and coke bottles into our inland waters, too. Filling the sea with plastic waste is bad enough. But to do the same to our rivers would be the last straw. And here's another thing we could do without: straws, plastic ones.
It was 20 years ago that I first set foot in Argentina Patagonia. I remember well the excitement of the descent into Esquel airport, the glorious light of the cordillera and the bumpy dirt road from traveling through the most beautiful valley of the Welsh Andes, jagged snow-topped peaks in every direction.