Ep 61: Japan, New Zealand, and Tasmania, with Rick Wallace
Rick Wallace runs Tackle Village, a site for gear, reviews, and advice from people who fish. Rick lives in southern Australia and also spent four years in Japan, giving him a wide range of international fly fishing experience. In this episode, we discuss Japan, New Zealand, and Tasmania. He covers the fisheries as a whole, as well as some tips for making a trip to one of these locations successful.
Website: tacklevillage.com
Fly tying hook tool: link
Facebook: /tacklevillage
Youtube: Tackle Village
Trout and King: website
Predator movie: link
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Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fishing the backcountry. This is episode 61 with Rick Wallace on Japan, New Zealand, and Tasmania. I would love to hear how you got your start in fishing and fly fishing specifically because I think I saw maybe on your website that you kind of dabble in all kinds of fishing and correct me if I'm wrong on that.
Rick
Yeah, look, I'm mostly a fly fisherman, but because living in Melbourne, it's a pretty urban environment and with kids, you know, I don't always have, like, big chunks of time to get out. So I do do a bit of lure fishing, you know, in the city here, which is quite good fish to target right in the city. So I do a little bit of that. But given the choice, I'd always fly fish. In terms of how I got into it, like, I grew up down that sort of tiny little dirt road in the country sort of three hours from Melbourne and we had a like a stream running through the property it was just like a you know 23 acres property and we had a stream running through the property which actually had trout in it so my old my dad had this sort of old fly rod that he'd had for years and I was just you know bored and started started casting it and then started targeting the trout that we had in this little stream and that was I'll probably when I was 10 I suppose and terrible pun but after that I was absolutely hooked and this where I grew up there was plenty of you know like Australian trout fishing is okay it's not not brilliant but mainland Australia Tasmania is great but yeah there was enough to sort of learn and develop and and you know sort of progress as as time went on
Katie
so what kind of trout do you have down there?
Rick
so brown and rainbow are the two the two main ones mainland Oz they get to you know a big fish would be sort of I don't know, four pounds, you'd be really happy with that. Of course, in New Zealand and Tazzy, you're talking much bigger fish, sort of 10 pounds, et cetera. It's quite good. It's okay. Yeah.
Katie
Do you have both species where you learn to fish? You're going after both browns and rainbows?
Rick
Yeah. Yeah. Different rivers will have them in different proportions. Some rivers will be brown only. Yeah. But most, there's both populations present.
Katie
Now, where you are now in Melbourne, do you get a lot of fishing opportunities pretty close to town or do you kind of have to go out into the country to find places to fish?
Rick
Yeah, good question. I think the best trout fishing, you have to drive an hour from Melbourne, sort of up into the mountain range, and probably two hours to access really good fishing. There's a lot of like sort of mountain, tiny mountain streams with some really good, you know, fishing that you can do with a two or three way. But then you get sort of two hours out and there's a few tail races, a few freestone streams that actually have quite good trout. And right, the tail race is great because, as you know, Australia's pretty hot. Melbourne gets hot in the summer, so the streams can heat up temperature-wise. So the tail race is good in that respect because the water's always cool and, you know, the fish population don't suffer in the summer. And then the mountain freestone streams are good too. And we have some lakes sort of about two hours from Melbourne too, which is, yeah, can offer good fishing. We tend to target those in the winter, though, to be honest. Some people target them year-round, but we have a closed season on trout in the rivers, so we'll go to tackle them in the lake in winter.
Katie
Okay. Now, what about warm water? Do you focus on trout, or do you find yourself getting out for, I don't know what all species you have there, but do you have anything apart from trout that you go after?
Rick
Yeah, we've got southern Oz. There's a bunch of estuary fish or coastal fish that we can target. A lot of them are, they're not huge sport fish, not like, you know, tarpon or GTs or anything like that, but which are further, you know, you can further north in Oz, you get GTs and barramundi and all those sort of sexy fish that we're quite renowned for. But down south, they're just sort of good eating fish that can be, you know, maybe 20 inches long. So there's ones called snapper flathead. We have a bass species down here, an Australian bass, which we target, estuary perch. So that kind of fish, yeah. I prefer trout personally, but if I want to catch something to eat for the family or whatever, I'd go out in the kayak in the bay in Melbourne and target those saltwater fish that are really good to eat.
Katie
That sounds like a lot of fun.
Rick
It's great. Yeah, yeah. Squid as well, by the way, which is so tasty. We have calamari squid that you can catch.
Katie
On the fly?
Rick
Not on the fly, just with squid jigs.
Katie
I don't know if you put them over there. I was like, I've never heard of it.
Rick
Look, they go for anything. If you did put a big clouser down there, they'd probably go for it. But the jigs are really effective at catching them.
Katie
Now, I know we're going to get into a couple of different topics. And I guess the topics are kind of divided in the countries, because you mentioned Japan, New Zealand and Australia, I guess, more specifically Tasmania. But I want to hear kind of an overview of like why you have experience in all these places. Like what took you to these different locations and allowed you to fish in these different areas?
Rick
Yeah, great question. Look, maybe I'll tackle NZ and Tazzy first and then Japan. So, look, as I did more and more fly fishing in Oz, you always want to sort of do the next frontier. And New Zealand's so close to us. I mean, it's a two-hour flight. And that for people who like brown trout fishing or trout fishing for big brown trout, they have rainbows over there too. but the brown trout is the sort of key target. It really is the mecca for that kind of fishing. What you have over there is like rivers where the population is not very high of trout but there might be four significant fish in a kilometer but they're all going to be six pounds plus, some very, very big fish. So I've probably done, I don't know, seven or eight trips over to New Zealand, to the South Island of New Zealand, just targeting those big brown trout. And it can be. It's a pretty brutal learning experience because they're very clever. They don't get to that size by being stupid and being caught by everyone. And you can walk for the typical day over there is you'll walk for sort of, I don't know, 10K up the river and maybe cast to sort of 10 fish. Get maybe four of them to eat and maybe land two, depending on your skill level. So people do a lot better than that. But that's sort of my typical day over there. So, you know, you've only got to be a little bit off and you'll come home empty-handed. But conversely, if you're on your game, you'll end up with sort of four fish that are not out of place on a trophy wall. It's all catch and release, I should add. But you'll end up with, you know, sort of four pretty big fish. Very exciting fishing. It's all sort of site fishing. So we try to do it in pairs, actually. It's better in pairs if you can have one person spotting and just try and get a bit of elevated ground above the river. The river's all super clear. and then look down into the river and point out where the fish is to you, to the fisher person who's sort of at river level. You tend to have sometimes a bit of glare and, you know, you can't always see. So you'll be saying, look, you know, it's three rod lengths near that little rock that you can see in the middle of the stream and then cast it out there and hope he hits it. And Tazzy, so that I can talk more about NZ depending on your interest level, but Tazzy is, again, like it's close to home and it's famous in this part of the world for incredible fishing and what you have the thing that's super special about Tazzy is in the center of Tazzy over thousands of lakes on a high plateau which is I don't know 3 000 feet above sea level or thereabouts and quite large and in all of these lakes there's populations of large brown trout and you can it's sort of wilderness area so you can park your car and depending on which lake you pick you can pick one that's two hours walk and you know you do go there and back in the day or you You can just take your tent and your gear and your food and just go for a hike for 10 hours or whatever and stay out for a few days. And, you know, you'll hardly see another person. You might see another few anglers. But it's genuinely a wilderness fishery. Again, it's tough, you know. You could go out for three days and finish with three fish or, you know, come home with 30, again, catch and release. But it's very, yeah, it's tricky and the weather can change and instant and but it's it's just a beautiful part of the world a wonderful part of the world to fish yeah I really really enjoy it
Katie
do you happen to know if there were any native species of fish in these waters before browns and rainbows made their way in like I know here we had like we have cutthroats but a lot of their their water has been kind of taken over by non-native species do you have any native species that were kind of pushed out by by the introduced ones or were they barren?
Rick
Yeah, no, very much so. There was like, those fish have been hit really hard. There was like a blackfish. I don't know what the scientific name is, but that was the prevalent fish in streams in Victoria and I think other parts of Australia as well. You'd barely find that fish now because the trout have taken over. Similarly, there's other fish like minnows called galaxids and stuff, which have been smashed pretty hard by the trout. Yeah, so the trout's been the successful introduced species has sort of taken over those streams, really. We have, you know, big native, bigger native fish like Murray Cod and those sort of fish which are, you know, still okay. They sort of occupy different water to the trout, slightly warmer, water more downstream from the trout. You know, the alpine streams are the trout are now the dominant species.
Katie
Do you know if there's any sort of, like, push to get those native species back in? Because that's, like, a big thing here is we love catching brown and rainbow trout, but there's also a lot of us that really are sad to see them take over areas that they weren't historically in. And there's been kind of a push to bring back the native fish. But I know that it's also always in conflict with people who just want to go out and catch a rainbow trout, you know. So has that been talked about at all?
Rick
Yeah, there is that kind of debate, but I think it's too late for those smaller species. And there's not the kind of recreational angling interest in them. Where we have the debate here is around whether we should stock the natives more intensely and sort of allow them to reclaim the trout water. So the native species, more like Murray Cod, I suppose, would be the predominant one. So you'll have people who say, look, you know, trout are effectively vermin and we shouldn't be stocking trout. We should only stock natives. And then you'll have people that say, well, look, the upper portion of the river is given out of trout. So let's make that a, keep that a good trout fishery. This is mainland Australia, I should say, in Tazzy and New Zealand. Like no one would, the trout's supreme. It's a big tourism industry. It's revered. So they wouldn't do anything on that front. The other thing we have over here is the European carb, which is a huge problem. So when it comes to sort of fisheries management, that's the dominant issue. It's an introduced species that's very damaging to waterways and is a huge biomass in the big rivers. So most people, the one thing we can agree on is we need to get rid of these carb. but we haven't found a way to do it yet.
Katie
I see. I'd like to come back and get some more details on New Zealand and Tasmania. But again, just give me kind of an overview of what brought you to Japan and allowed you to stay there and fish there for, I think I saw a couple of months you were there. Or no, sorry, four years, wasn't it?
Rick
Yeah, four years.
Katie
Okay, four years. That's even four months.
Rick
Yeah, four years. So I was a journalist in Australia for a long time, my kind of almost last job, I suppose, in journalism was to be the Tokyo correspondent or the North Asia correspondent for the newspaper I was working on at the time, The Australian. So I went over there, you know, to cover Japan sort of culturally and economically, et cetera. And, you know, I packed my fishing gear almost as an afterthought, to be honest. I thought, you know, fishing over there would be on some pier, like, you know, shoulder to shoulder, like casting, you know, for the very few fish to be in the ocean there. But when I got over there, I became friends with a trade commissioner who was a very keen fly fisherman. And he opened my eyes pretty quick that there's some amazing opportunities for fly fishing there. If you think so, we can unpack these as we go. But he showed me that I was based in Tokyo and showed me that there's opportunities sort of within two hours of Tokyo. And then the bigger opportunities, which are in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. So during my four years, I spent a lot of time fishing in both those areas.
Katie
That's pretty cool. Now, would you say, just from your perspective, I know that New Zealand and Tasmania are probably a lot easier for you to access. Like, I'm sure you could take almost an impromptu trip to either of those places. But as someone who has come from, like, out of the country to those areas, would you say that, like, one is easier than the other? I guess more between New Zealand and Japan to go as an outsider and be able to make a fishing trip work without, you know, paying for a guide and everything, just trying to figure out the system, figure out where the fish are?
Rick
Yeah, really good question. New Zealand can work DIY or do itself easily. Look, it is better with a guide. But if you choose your rivers carefully, I mean, there's some rivers where you can just swing wet flies or nymphs and, you know, you'll catch fish after fish. or there's a couple of hatch-driven rivers in the south where any fisherman, fish person in the US is used to fishing, you know, mayfly hatches or catch fish. I think where you need the guide or a partner or be pretty skilled is in that site fishing for the big fish in those rivers. Japan, now because of the language barrier, I think you really do need a guide initially. Also, Hokkaido, you have the issue of brown bears. Like, look, I mean, Australians tend to be scared of bears. You guys are probably a bit more blasé about them over there. But there are a lot of areas with big brown bears. So I feel nervous fishing Hokkaido on my own. So I prefer to go with friends or a guide. Yeah, that's fair. I'm happy to sort of go on my own and just do it on my own because there's nothing that can hurt you. They don't even have snakes in New Zealand, would you believe? So there's literally nothing that can hurt you. right yeah so and then Tazzy yeah look Tazzy is probably the the easiest I think you know the lakes are tough fishery but there's rivers there that you can fish and you don't need a guide you don't need to be the greatest angler in the world yeah so so they all kind of have their challenges they're all can be done do itself but just a day or two guided at the start of the trip would be my recommendation
Katie
all right well do you want to I don't know what makes sense in terms getting the conversation set up but do you think you just want to go through each of these places and just kind of talk about the fishing there and what goes into it why don't we talk about Japan first and I can come back to the the other places
Rick
yeah okay yeah that sounds good well maybe we do it by speed species I'll just tell you about my first trips to Hokkaido. so I met up with this oh let's do Tokyo first so Tokyo you know it's 35 million people grow to Tokyo it's so the first fly fishing I did there was in ponds they have these ponds where you you know go and go and catch these stock trout it's kind of you know just to scratch the itch but then tack the guy the trade commissioner I was friends with took me up into the mountains and we we just we just ran to boat and do some sort of site fishing to rising rainbows in some reservoirs there that was great fun but then he said the next thing you need to do is come and try and get time in Hokkaido and I i didn't even know this species existed it's like I knew that there was rainbow trout there because I started doing reading about Hokkaido but quite a bit just to put into context it's probably like for Japanese what Alaska is for you guys so in terms of it being a frontier so it's a big island with only only by Japanese standards five million people there so it's snowbound for you know nine months of the year well not nine maybe eight months of the year it's sort of under pretty heavy snow it's right up north near Siberia so and towards Kamchatka so it's a pretty cold place and I have this short sharp summer and during this sort of short sharp summer you get heaps of intake life coming out to the streams and there's great terrestrial fishing for big rainbows, but there's also this taimen. So I'll come back to the rainbows, but the taimen was the first thing that piqued my interest because I'd only heard of them existing in Mongolia.
Katie
That's what I thought too. I didn't know that until I saw you mention it in your document.
Rick
Yeah. So I mean, where it's sort of this river bound fish in the middle of nowhere effectively and big fish. And now they told me, no, it's like a sea run anadromous version of taimen. It's its own species, effectively. So we went up there and we – so I did a few trips up there. Again, it's kind of fishing where you'll go. So the place we chose to target these is like a little estuary in the far, far north of Hokkaido, a place called Sarafutsu. And you'd sort of go out and basically there's two ways you could try to target them. You can look for the – they basically hunt in the estuary. They hunt the bait fish, and you can see them sort of boil and break the water as they're hunting these bait fish. So you can sort of try to sort of stalk around the shallows of the estuary until you see one and then cast and put a cast out in front of it and try to get them that way. Or you can just Chiba, the guy I fish with, he's a good cast with double-handed rods. So he just blasts out long casts over the whole river and basically strip back these either streamers or surface flies and just cover the water. So there were those sort of two ways to catch them. And the first, we just went up for a weekend the first time and there was, I think, five of us fishing, Taken, Shiba and a couple of Japanese friends. And I think we ended up with five fish over the course of the weekend, which is a great, great result for time. And the biggest Taken, the biggest fish was 95 centimeters. Oh, sorry, I've got to talk inches here. about 40 inches.
Katie
There we go. So the surface flies you're using, are they, I assume it's not like the, you know, beautiful dry fly for trout that you're going to leave, sit, call me on the surface. Like, would you be disturbing the surface? Like almost like pike fishing, I would assume with these like bigger predatory fish, you've got to kind of make it enticing.
Rick
Yeah. Yeah. He's, he really rips it. It's like a gurgler sort of fly and maybe about that long and just rip it through the and make a splash and they come up and take it off the surface okay it was yeah amazing fishing he yeah but the fish I'll send you a picture of the fish that tack got that time it's a beautiful they're just a gorgeous fish so this thing was like I said 40 inches long and it's they have like a pink glow to them not like a rainbow not like a stripe but the head and shoulders of the fish is sort of a really beautiful pink color They're a big, sort of thick set, really nicely proportioned trout, sort of salmonid species. They're gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous fish. Yeah.
Katie
Are they like all over Hokkaido or is it a pretty specific like river systems that they come into?
Rick
Very specific. There's only, they are a threatened species. So there's only really four regions where they exist now. And I've only fished the one. There's the biggest river in Hokkaido, the Tesho River, they exist in that. They exist in a lake and they exist in Sarafutsu, which is a small system, and then a couple of other places.
Katie
Okay.
Rick
Yeah.
Katie
Now, with them being threatened, are there any sort of restrictions around targeting them?
Rick
No, no, unfortunately not. They're sort of – Japan's very advanced in some ways, but very behind in others. And, no, there's no real restrictions. We were trying to get those introduced, actually, by sort of pressuring the local authorities a bit. But that sort of only goes so far, especially if the Western are doing the pressuring. But Japanese friends are trying to get that sorted. But I think the best protection we felt was to sort of write about them and, you know, publicize them as a sports fishing species because it encourages the locals to sort of value them more. It's not a very wealthy area of Japan, so the tourism is sort of meaningful and just encourage more people to fish catch and release for them because you can. The locals can catch them and eat them. They're not a very nice-eating fish, but there is that opportunity, or they'll catch them on lure and not care for them properly and stuff. So, yeah, I think it's at the point where the best management is to popularize them as a sports fish.
Katie
Yeah, I could see that. So what other species were you targeting up there? I don't know where they are found in Japan, but I've seen lots of species of trout that are, as far as I know, are unique to Japan. I could be wrong about that. And I don't remember what all they're called, but there's at least a handful of like some smaller, very pretty trout that I would almost liken to our brook trout here. Do you know which ones I'm talking about?
Rick
I do. Yeah, yeah. I'll just mention one more story about the time and then I'll come back onto those because yeah, there are quite a few of those, some small ones and larger ones as well. So the time and the first, after I wrote a piece for Fly Life, the magazine we have down here, which people subscribe to all around the world, it's a fly fishing mag, obviously. so I wrote this piece about the timing for that and Nick Raga who's an Aussie guy who lives in New Zealand who makes fly fishing films he made I don't know if you've seen he made the hatch one called hatched one called leviathan anyway a bunch of fly fishing films this is what he was doing for a career at the time and he emailed me and said I saw that piece about the timing I want to come over and catch them or whatever and we had a brief discussion about it and didn't hear anything more about it and then he he contacted me and he said I'm coming over in a week this is like a few months later and and I said yeah no worries just we'll book a trip and I've got three days come over and he goes yeah I'm filming this movie called predator so I want to make sure that we catch them and I've got well there's no guarantees you know we can go there and catch nothing and he goes yeah yeah we'll sort that out when it comes and so I locked in cheaper to come with us for three days. And so Nick arrives at my doorstep and he stays a night at my place and he had this picture in his mind of Japan being horrendously expensive and he said, listen, I'm nearly broke. My credit card's overdrawn and just finishing off this movie, so this really has to be successful. Otherwise I'm in a world of trouble. So first day one we got out at, it's so far north it's light at four in the morning. So the first day we got out at four on the water. And so we got because we were so stressed about it, not catching anything for him. And so the first day we got 270 centimeters, which is, oh, God, my mass is terrible. But that's probably, I don't know, 30 inches. Not a bad big fish. Not big by time and standards, but big enough for me. And so he came home and he's looking at the footage. And as we're back in the lodge or the hotel, and he goes, yeah, I mean, it's not really a predator, is it? And so we go, okay, set the alarm for four the next morning and we went out and the next morning we caught two 80s and he was relatively happy with that. And then the final morning we caught two 95s.
Katie
There you go.
Rick
So they were the predators. And he also got the footage of me missing. There was a, they have a club over there, like an informal club for anyone who's caught one over one meter or 40 inches. And there was only like five or six members in the sort of broader group that we fished with. And they had little badges with the one meter fish on it. And I wanted to be the first non-Japanese to be admitted to the club. So Nick was there and we were doing the stalking technique and we wandered up the river and we found this spot where this one fish was just circling. And he'd come in and he'd smash the bait and this little heron sitting on the – because they know where the fish is going to come. And so when the fish comes up, the baits shower onto the bank and the heron comes down and eats them. So you can sort of readily see where their ambush points are. So we had this little tube fly and Nick caught it all on camera and we go up and I put the fly out there and I've seen him come in and he's done one of these ambushes and between ambushes, put the fly there and I just talked to him and gave it a bit of a strip and then you see this like huge swirl on the camera and the fish comes in and grabs it. It's the one-meter one. This is the one I wanted. And so I'm fighting him for about, I don't know, five seconds or whatever, and then I had so much line out that the loose line caught around the fighting butt of the rod. Oh, no. And it just went completely, just completely hard and then ping the leader snaps. And, yeah, Nick caught the whole thing over my failure on camera, which he very, very kindly put in the movie, which is I don't think I'll ever live down. But yeah, so that was my – I got close to the One Meter Club but never got in it, unfortunately.
Katie
Well, at least you got a good story out of it.
Rick
Yeah.
Katie
What was the name of that? You said the name of the movie was Predator?
Rick
Predator, yeah.
Katie
And where can you view it?
Rick
Good question. I think it's on his site. His company is called Gin Clear Media. Yeah, or maybe on Vimeo as well. I think he started distributing his content on Vimeo as well. I'll send you a link when we get off for the best way to find it.
Katie
Yeah, I'd love to put it in the show notes, and I'd love to watch it myself too.
Rick
Yeah, yeah. It was fun. There was nine chapters, I think, in that film, most of them in Australia, but some in different, various other parts of the world. Yeah, so that was the time. And the other species, maybe talk about the rainbows and then the more specialized species after that. So the rainbows are huge fun. in a sense because I like dry fly fishing. So they, for me, were equally as fun as the time. And like I wasn't mad keen on doing what Chiba did, which was belting out the stripping wets or gerblers or whatever. I'd much rather side fish. So time and I could do that when you see them boil, et cetera. But the rainbows are unbelievable. Like most of the streams are sort of canopy forest up above and you get like aphids and caterpillars and everything dropping onto the water. So you're fishing with big stimulators or Chernobyl ants and that sort of thing. And just side fishing to these hugely powerful rainbows. You know, that could be sort of 20 inches, 25 inches, really big fish. And super strong as well. And they're fussy as well. Like New Zealand, the reputation of the rainbows is pretty easy to catch and not the preferred trout species because it's not as smart. But I don't know if that's – is that the perception you guys have with rainbows over there or are they kind of equally valued versus browns
Katie
I feel like overall the culture leans more toward liking browns but I think there's a variety of reasons some people say that they are more aggressive like they'll chase down a big streamer versus a rainbow and they like that or just that they get big and really vibrant colors I kind of say I think I like them probably about equal but I think it definitely does skew toward brown trout and people tend to look at rainbows unless it's some really really beautiful wild specimen
Rick
yeah right except for the steelhead I suppose which seems to be pretty revered yeah
Katie
I think that's considered kind of a completely different category yeah okay yeah now are these rainbows sea run because I wanted to ask that like are they almost some sort of version of steelhead or are they just they're landlocked
Rick
landlocked I think. essentially yeah I don't know if there's population that are in the river mouse or some of those but I don't think so, no. And some of it's pretty tight water, like small streams and bamboo and all sorts of plants over them and lots of bear country. Yeah, Chiba would get pretty nervous. You'd always carry like two cans of bear sprays at some of these rivers. I never saw one, to be honest. I saw the paw prints and stuff, but yeah, never had an encounter with the bears over there. But yeah, they're pretty prevalent.
Katie
Yeah, I could see that being nerve wracking for someone coming from a place where aren't an issue and you don't have to think about it.
Rick
Yeah, that's right. And the other species I can touch on very briefly and then hand over a few questions. But so the other species which we caught over there quite a bit was one called white spotted char, which is like a native species only to Japan. They call it amemas. And it's a beautiful fish. Again, I'll send you a pic of it. And the famous hatch they have there is there's a two-week window were on a lake called lake arcan where there's big these big mayflies hatch that are the sort of the size of your green drakes and this this hatch only occurs for two weeks and yeah we'd go up to the that lake and then target those those fish for that hatch and they just get up on the surface and slurp down these these big mayflies yeah really fun really really fun fishing absolutely gorgeous fish
Katie
and what like what size are those roughly are we talking large like kind of like Like with the rainbows you're talking about, are they even larger than that?
Rick
They're similar to the rainbows, yeah. You can catch 20-inch fish. They don't pull as hard as the rainbows. And, you know, yeah, on the whole, if you've got one sort of 20 inches, you'd be pretty happy. And there's a lot of fish that are smaller than that, that are sort of 15 inches.
Katie
Kind of like an average-sized trout.
Rick
Yeah, I reckon. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that same fish exists as, I'm going to get the terminology wrong, there's the two really small trout species, those beautifully colored ones, Iwana and the other name will come to me, but they're very famous fish that you fish for with tenkara or you can fish with two weights and go up those mountain streams. So the sort of smaller version of the amemas is one of those.
Katie
Yeah, I think those are the ones I was thinking of.
Rick
Yeah. I didn't do much fishing for those, I've got to say. I've actually got the chart behind me. look up what which one was this is like this is banished to my office my wife let me put this on the wall in the house but this has got all of the trout and salmon species of northern Japan so this white spotted char that's this one here yeah but yeah like in its in its small version I think it's along with these two it's oh your mummy that's the other one your mama and iwana are the two tiny char species one of which is this the other one which is I think this landlocked salmon species and they're the ones that people go up into those sort of mountain streams and and fish for with the tiny tiny tiny rod or tenkara and that sort of thing which is good fishing too it's very interesting apparently they just take everything that's off the surface So very visual fishing.
Katie
Did you get to go after them at all? You said you didn't do much fishing, but did you get to catch either one?
Rick
No, no. I saw them in the stream. Sometimes just go with my kids and just hiking and stuff. And, you know, you'd flick a little caterpillar or something into the water and they'd just charge up and eat it. But no, not fishing-wise. Because I think when I got the window, I just wanted to try to catch those bigger fish.
Katie
Yeah, that makes sense. I think given the opportunity to catch a meter long fish or one of the tiny ones, assuming they're both native to the area, I think we'd all choose the 40 incher.
Rick
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, 100%.
Katie
I had two specific questions about Japan. Because when I was there, I was in Japan a couple of years ago, but we went to ski. So I didn't get to do any sort of fishing because we were there, obviously, when it was there were a couple feet of snow on the ground. But the two questions I had are about licensing and land access. So do you need a fishing license? And if so, is it a pretty easy thing to get? And then also separately, what's the access like? Is it pretty easy to find land to access the water? Are you talking to private landowners? What's the situation?
Rick
Yeah, good question. Licensing, no. I don't think you need a license. We didn't need a license for anywhere we fished. The only exception would be there's a lot of private fisheries like the lakes up in the mountains and stuff where you'll pay a day permit or Akan Lake. Yeah, you had to pay a day permit, which was sort of $30 a day or something like that. And access is pretty good. It's very built-up country, so you'll see bridges and roads and things like that so that you can access the waterway pretty quickly, pretty quickly and easily. Yeah. And Hokkaido, there's not many people around. You can just get to the water with no problems.
Katie
Okay. So is it like actually public land or is it just that landowners don't mind? Or like what is it just no one owns it? What's like, why are you able to get down to the water so easily?
Rick
Yeah, I think it's a good question. Look, I think it's ambiguous whether it's public or private in some cases, but rural Japan's been so depopulated, like people is like people drawn into the big cities really. And I think it's sort of, you know, you go up there and there'll be a lot of properties that are neglected or, you know, land holdings where there's no one there, you can just walk through it effectively. Like, yeah, Japan's, it's a pretty impenetrable society in a lot of respects. So I'm sure that there are logical answers to your question, But I reckon after living there even for four years, I only probably understood a quarter of it.
Katie
That's fair. Yeah, I figured, I mean, it could be different. And it's hard to imagine it outside of my experience, which is that, you know, here there is a very distinct line between public and private land. And if you're on private land, that landowner is going to know and not want you there. I'm sure there's a lot of places where that's just not the case. but it's so hard to picture being in a different realm where the perception is just different and the attitudes are just different about it. And I'm trying to put it into a box that I'm familiar with and it might just not apply to what I'm used to.
Rick
Yeah, maybe. And I also think Japan's, I don't know, it's a very, like, face is very important and stuff. So I think even if you were going across property or whatever, that you wouldn't be confronted. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't know, everything sort of operates on innate understanding. So, like, I'd go with Chiba, for example, and he'd, you know, have in his head where you can go and where you can't go and what's likely to cause confrontation and what's not. So I'd just sort of fall in with him. But I don't think you're going to get into too much trouble. If you went up there on your own and you sort of were fishing somewhere you weren't meant to be, people are going to be very polite about it. And often the hotel or the lodge you're staying at or whatever would – they have these old inns there called rear cans, which is where you'll stay a lot of times in the country. And they'll have like a beautiful onsen bath and they'll do sort of bed and breakfast. And the owners of those can usually advise on access and, you know, who's, which, what are the best points to access the water?
Katie
Okay. Yeah, I remember them being very polite there. There weren't a lot of confrontations about anything. I do remember that being a big part of the culture was just, you know, you might be corrected, but in a very polite way. And not at all making you fear that you're going to be attacked or screamed at or anything like that.
Rick
How did you find the skiing, by the way? Or boarding? Were you boarding or skiing?
Katie
Skiing. It was fantastic. And I don't even think we got, we didn't even get like a great week there, relatively. I mean, it snowed a little bit, but, you know, it could have snowed feet while we were there and it didn't. It snowed probably a couple inches a day, but it was still fantastic. Yeah.
Rick
Where did you ski?
Katie
We did, I think, one day at Niseko, and then we did a couple at Kiroro and Rusutsu. And we liked Rusutsu by far the best.
Rick
Yeah. Good terrain, isn't it, there?
Katie
Yeah. It was a ton of fun.
Rick
It's kind of a dilapidated old resort.
Katie
It is. But in kind of a fun way.
Rick
Yeah, yeah.
Katie
There weren't a lot of people there. It was nice to have something different from Colorado, which is, you know, the entire country is traveling to Colorado to ski every year. So it was nice to not have lines and stuff.
Rick
Yeah, great. Yeah, no, I love the skiing over there. It's good in Honshu as well. Like the Hokkaido gets the colder, better snow, but Honshu gets – the main island gets more snow.
Katie
Oh, I didn't know that.
Rick
Yeah, you get those big storms that come in off the Sea of Japan on the Korean side, and the first thing that hits those Japan alps and they just dump heaps of snow. It's like – it was so funny. I've been there days where it snowed like 40 centimeters, so I'd go back to inches. you know, like 15 inches, 20 inches, 25 inches, like just day after day. It's really good fun.
Katie
Now, I guess this would be maybe a good transition to talk about New Zealand because I've not gotten to ski there, but I'm thinking maybe you have if you're a skier.
Rick
Yeah, I have a few times. It's good, but it's not a patch on Japan, to be honest. It's beautiful. The mountains are beautiful there, but they're in a bit of a sort of rain shadow. So you get snow, but it's nowhere near as reliable. And the infrastructure is not quite as good. So there's some pretty, some of the mountains up there you access, you can't stay on mountain for conservation reasons. That's how they want to manage it, which is fine. So you have to drive up in the mornings. And some of the bloody drives up there are very hair-raising, like on slippery roads, and you're getting the bus up in the morning. Yeah, but it's gorgeous. It's beautiful. You get a lot of sunshine. But I think compared to the States, the quality of snow and the quantity is probably not as good and certainly not as good as Japan.
Katie
But the fishing is probably better than most places. If you're talking in terms of, like you said, trophy quality, I know you can't keep fish, but the size, if I think of giant trout, New Zealand is probably the first place it comes to mind. Because it seems like you're either catching nothing or you're catching a giant trout. And, you know, we have the ability to catch big trout here, but most fish people are catching are probably between 10 and 18 inches or so. And it doesn't sound like that's the case in New Zealand. It's like, go big or go home.
Rick
Yeah, very much so. They'd laugh at you for some of the fish that we are happy with in Australia. It's like, yeah, they're just not on the register over there. Yeah, it's not. They're phenomenal rivers. There's so many rivers and they're all crystal clear. And they have some really good, they don't have big hatches, but they have lots of falls of cicadas and insect like a, you have the same cicadas over there, I think, don't you?
Katie
Yeah, we just had a big, big hatch.
Rick
Oh, did you?
Katie
Yeah, like one of the, I think it was called the Brood X. It didn't happen in my part of the country, but there was a huge cicada hatch earlier this year that was causing a big stir in the fly fishing world.
Rick
And did it deliver or was it sort of a bit of a fizzle?
Katie
Honestly, I didn't pay too much attention to it because we didn't get them around here. so it wasn't that relevant to me.
Rick
Yeah, right. Over there, every February, I think it's peak season for those cicadas and they're there every year. That's such fun fishing because you're casting a big sort of deer hair fly or foam or whatever and they come up from a couple yards of water, like say it's seven feet of water, they'll just come up and take them off the surface. And everyone falls into the trap of, because they take them quite slowly, you often strike way too early. So you've got to count to three before you actually set the hook. So it goes up and takes a cicada and usually it's on that downward angle point you strike, hopefully. Yeah, it's hard to keep your nerve though.
Katie
Yeah, you mentioned or you asked if we had cicadas here, but actually that sounds more similar, just thinking of our equivalent of our salmon fly hatch. You know, like every early summer, getting the big salmon flies coming off for just a couple weeks. And while it's happening, the fish kind of turn their attention to these giant insects on the surface. And they'll kind of just gorge themselves on it during that time. So that sounds kind of like our equivalent of what you're describing, I think.
Rick
Yeah, yeah. Oh, that sounds really good fishing too. Yeah, anything on the surface I love.
Katie
Yeah, I can picture what you're talking about with striking early with those big fish that just slowly rise to the surface. And you can just see them coming up like a submarine, you know, rising up. and you just can't keep your nerves together when that's happening.
Rick
Yeah, they have, they say in New Zealand, it's like, we're kind of still a Commonwealth country. So they say, you've got to say, God save the queen before you actually strike. Or you can sort of count one, I prefer to say, you know, 1,001, 1,002, 1,003, bang. Yeah. Oh, there's just one other good hatch over there, or hatch will fall over there. There's a thing called the willow grubs that fall out of the trees. They're like a tiny yellow. We have them here too, but they're green and they fall out of the trees and they just, the trout lock onto them obsessively and they feed, they come up and feed so rapidly and their window of vision's so focused that it's really fun to fish because you've got to literally land at centimeters or just a couple of inches from their nose. And it's frustrating. It'll tear your hair out sometimes, but it's really, really interesting fishing too because you can just see them. only an inch or two beneath the water just going up and eating these willow crops as they fall on.
Katie
So is dry fly fishing really only a thing during these handful of specific hatches and the rest of it's kind of nymphing or what's kind of the seasonal schedule like?
Rick
Yeah, good question. Early season they'll mostly nymph and we'll do the same in Australian rivers. Australian rivers have probably better hatches so we'll switch to dry as soon as the hatches, as soon as we're allowed really with the hatches we'll allow for it. Over there, yeah, they'll nymph through. So the start of the season is probably September, I think is open season. So it'd be a reverse of you guys. So September, October, November, they've generally been nymphing with an indicator. And then you can catch big numbers of fish that way. Early season, there's less fishing pressure. And then high summer rolls around and you're sort of starting to get some fish that are on and dry. And, you know, you'll take it on a fish-by-fish basis so you'll see the fish feeding. and if he's nymphing, you'll just be going side to side, side to side and you'll target him with a nymph usually. But if you think the fish is sometimes coming up and taking something or even if he's just close enough to the surface, you can sometimes throw a dryer, just try it anyway. And if he doesn't come up, just switch to the nymph. But yeah, nymphing is probably the most, if you want to get numbers, it's probably the most logical, particularly early in the season.
Katie
That's so interesting, just because I do sight fish occasionally. But for the most part here, and maybe you can fill me in on Tasmania or Australia in general, you're kind of casting out to fish that you don't see. You're looking for good water that would hold fish. And occasionally you might see one and be able to say like, oh, I see that fish rising. But normally you're looking for rises, not a specific fish and whether it's rising. But it sounds like in New Zealand, you're kind of walking, walking, walking until you see one and then doing whatever it takes to catch that fish. And then I assume walking, walking, walking, and then assess again when you see the next fish almost individually for each one with a lot of downtime in between. Is that kind of an accurate way to describe it?
Rick
Yeah, so it ends in very much so. And to the point where if you get a cloudy day, because when you've got that cloud, you get that gray light off the water and you can't see. it means you're going to really, really struggle unless you can find somewhere where there's a bluff or a cliff. When you're looking into the water and it's about on the other side of the water is a dark, big, dark mass, you can actually see into the water. So that's one option if it's cloudy. And the other option is to fish like a spring creek where you are like just seeing, you can see the rises or just find somewhere where you can fish the water as you guys are doing in your part of the world or sometimes in Australia we'll fish the same way as well. I mean, it's like you've got to fish the water as well. But NZ, it's like fishing the water isn't that productive because there's a lot of water with no fish in it. But where the fish is, it's a big fish. So it's, yeah, I think river selection is pretty critical when it's windy or overcast.
Katie
Now, what do you prefer? If you could only do one of these two things, what would you do? Would you rather be in a river that there's barely any fish when you do find one, it's like the fish of your life and you're kind of hunting it? Or do you prefer kind of fishing the water and having lots of opportunities at maybe smaller fish, but you can kind of cast the whole time, you can be fishing the whole time and not worry about blowing your only opportunity of the day?
Rick
That's a really good question. Look, as long as it's sight fishing, I'm not that fast to which one. So like Willow Grubs, I love fishing that hatch because you can, you get lots of shots you get the best of both worlds you sort of sight fishing and seeing the fish but you also get probably more shots than like a typical walking up a typical freestone river yeah but the size of the the fish that you get from that sort of you know the hardcore sort of polaroid you know five shots a day sort of fishing the size is is huge so look at one of those days that if it's a still clear day and they're taking off the surface and you end up catching some that's probably the pinnacle but there's for every one of those there's a few that you just get skunked as we'll say over here come home with nothing and yeah just tails of hard luck so maybe a little bit of both
Katie
then it sounds like and mayfly hatches and stuff
Rick
I like fishing those as well trying to sort of clue into what they're what they what they're eating in the hatch and what phase they have a couple of rivers in NZ where in new Zealand where there's hatch driven fisheries there's a famous one in the south called the matara which has really good fly hatches so yeah that's that's a great river to fish an easy river so if you nymphed it it's easy you'd catch like heaps of really decent fish in a day but dry fly it can be tricky but still very productive
Katie
and how does Tasmania then compare to New Zealand? because I think it's easy for people maybe coming from the states to see them on a map and say they're kind of right next to each other you know globally speaking they're they're right next to each other are they I know you mentioned that New Zealand's a lot of these rivers with sparse fish and Tasmania has some like the high plateau lakes so are they are they at all similar due to the proximity are they basically completely separate fisheries that have nothing to do with one another and you wouldn't even know that you're basically right next to the other island?
Rick
Yeah good question. I think they're similar only in the quality of fishing so if you can imagine like New Zealand's like a really new landform like jagged mountains earthquakes etc and sort of like the rockies if you picture the rockies in that sense like and you know it's crystal clear it's whereas Australia is a very old landform heavily eroded it's sort of forested really really heavily forested and and the the rivers probably flow through some farming country as well and they're more nutrient rich and support a higher head of fish. And, yeah, so they're kind of the fishing environment is quite different between the two. And New Zealand's sort of ultra remote, especially down south as well, so not that many people. Most of the people you see will be anglers, to be honest, which is a bit annoying sometimes because that mode of fishing, like there's no point following someone else up a river. You know, once you do that, you're done. Like the fish are put down for the day. Like if you and I fished a 20K stretch, there'd be no point coming behind us. Someone coming behind us fishing it for that day, maybe tomorrow. But yeah. And so I suppose that the remoteness is the other key in those Alpine lakes in Tazzy and New Zealand. There's that kind of remoteness thing and the size of the fish and the limited recruitment, I suppose. Also, like you've got like some of those lakes where there's no spawning stream. That's where you get the big trophies because, you know, there's not much replenishment of fish. So the fish that are in there, again, coming back to the sort of biomass are big. You know, they're going to be really big.
Katie
I had a question about Tasmania based on something that you mentioned earlier. You talked about like you drive your car and are you talking about a rental car here or are you able to like ferry your car across to Tasmania?
Rick
Good question. Yeah, when we go, we take the car usually on the ferry. There is a car ferry that goes across. It takes about 14 hours, I think. It mostly goes overnight. So you leave at dinner time and you wake up early in the morning and you're in Tazzy and you're ready to go. But you can rent a car as well. Yeah.
Katie
The other question I had was you mentioned camping up there. What's the camping situation? Are you able to just park your car and walk up in and pitch a tent by these lakes? Or are there specific designated areas that you have to go to? How do you do that?
Rick
They're both really well set up for camping. You can rent a renting a van's pretty popular in New Zealand, like a caravan or RV or whatever you want to call it. So people will do that and drive around the south and you can pretty much park and sleep wherever you like. If you want amenities, there's heaps of little camping grounds that you can just pay, you know, $15 a night or whatever and and stay there. And then you have the benefit of the shower, toilet, kitchen, etc. And there's also like lots of national park sites where you can just, I think free basically, you just pitch a tent and, you know, make your own food, etc. The only thing you've got to be a bit careful of in Australia is bushfire. Sometimes we have seasons where you can't light a fire because of the risk of fire getting out of control. I don't know if they have that so much in New Zealand. It would be definitely a thing in Tasmania and certainly in mainland Australia.
Katie
Now does Tasmania have the creepy crawlies that Australia is famous for, for anyone coming from the rest of the world? and thinking that everyone or everything in Australia can kill you, need you?
Rick
Yeah, yeah, they do. Look, they're not that bad. The main thing is the snakes, to be honest. Like the spiders, like, I mean, yeah, I see spiders in Australia and people don't like them, but look, they don't kill many people. But the snakes are, yeah, you can't, there's no getting away from the snakes. They do like the same areas that trout like, like, you know, grassy riverbanks and et cetera. Yeah, you'll see them and they're a bit scary, but just wearing it means you have to – the only real thing is it means you have to wear Gore-Tex waders through summer.
Katie
Okay.
Rick
And sometimes that can be a bit nasty. Look, much better than the sort of old days of the rubber waders and stuff. But the Gore-Tex is good. But in New Zealand, for example, they'll wet wade in shorts most of the summer, but we won't do that here because of the snakes. And same in Tazzy. Yeah, you'll see a lot of snakes, but for the most part, they won't come after you or anything. It's just if you step on them by mistake, they'll bite you. But yeah, they're not super aggressive.
Katie
Yeah, we've kind of got the same thing here. You know, like we wet wade here all summer long. But I know that I've got a buddy down in Georgia who wears waders year round because he's like, it's just so dense with the vegetation and there's snakes in the vegetation that you'll never see until you step on them. So now it's a big thing down there.
Rick
Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, New Zealand's got all the luck, I reckon. Like, no, zero snakes, big fish.
Katie
Right. So I guess just finishing up with Tasmania, anything of note about the fishing there? I know we've kind of talked about what made Japan unique and what made New Zealand unique. If you had to describe Tasmania to somebody and maybe sell them on it, like, why would someone want to come to Tasmania to go fishing?
Rick
Yeah, I think there's three things. So there's that plateau, which is just fantastic fishing, and you can feel like you're basically on the moon effectively. You won't see any other people. It's a really special experience. Then the other two things they have is they have these trout that do this thing called tailing. So on those highland lakes in the morning before first light, those fish will come in right into the margins of the lake and they'll eat these snails. And what they do is they put their nose down and then you can see the tail come up. So ideal session over there. We fished a lake called Lake Fergus, a friend and I, a couple of seasons ago, and we hiked in for 10K and backpacks and everything. And so the first morning we'd get up and it's like all you can see around the perimeter of the lake is this at four in the morning is all these tails. And you basically, so you know where the fish is, and you basically just got to creep up to the water and then just cast like really, really accurately, in a way that's delicate enough not to spook them because it's still and it's glassy and any false cast bang they're gone so yeah and you've also got the time pressure so you get this sort of because once the light gets up they'll they'll go back out into the center of the lake and yeah so there's a tailing fishing which exists there which is just superb and a trout not really known to do that anywhere else so I've never seen it happen anywhere else and that I fished and they're pretty big fish as well. So I like the tailing. And for people who like fishing big lakes with boats, they have this fishing over there where you can – they have a couple of large lakes on that central plateau and they get big waves whipped up, and you can go out there and Polaroid these fish in the waves. They call it shark fishing because a lot of them are quite big. And you can sort of use the waves and wind lanes on the lake to try and target these big fish that are sort of working these wind lanes. I haven't done it myself, but that's another unique and very popular bit of fishing about Tasmania that you can do in Tazzy.
Katie
Yeah, these all sound like very distinct. I guess you could even call Japan, like we're talking about kind of like different islands, you know, different islands kind of roughly the same longitudinal area of the world and all completely different in terms of like what fish are there and what the fish are doing there. Because I mean, even it sounds like Tasmania and New Zealand have the same species, but they act completely differently. You know, these tailing lake fish versus the giant, like solo New Zealand trout that just grow really big. And yeah, it's just like, it's crazy how they can be so close geographically, but be completely separate in terms of how they behave, even as the same species.
Rick
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's amazing. It's a good way to look at it, actually. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. But yeah, it's true. They are genuinely big behaviors and sort of methods of fishing.
Katie
Just to wrap up, I saw that you have a website and you wanted to mention your hook size or hook gauge tool. Oh, yeah. I took a look at it, but I want to ask you more about it and also just have you plug your website.
Rick
Yeah, no worries. yeah so the website's just a bit of a kind of passion project I suppose covering both gear fishing as you'd say as well as fly fishing so I basically one of the things I want to do with the website was create this tool so because I tie flies I'm not the greatest fly tire in the world but I do like to tie my own flies because some of these hatches you get over here it's difficult to buy the right flies for them so you're tying your own flies and what used to really annoy me was having to jump on the internet and try and go through those old hook conversion charts. You know, if you're tired with TMCO and you've run out and you go, oh, God, I've only got these camisards, is that the same as, you know, the Daichi XXX or whatever? So I got all the charts together and I got this Russian programmer guy on the internet and he created the tool and really, really clever guy and he just built it as a plug-in in a day. So we put all of the data we could find from these charts, and it's not perfect at this point, but we put it into this tool. So if you want to go on there now, the website's tacklevillage.com, and there's search for the tool. So there's two ways you can use it. You can either, if you're tying a terrestrial flyer or whatever, you can select terrestrial from the dropdown, and it'll give you the makes of hook that would suit it, tying a grasshopper or a curved emerger or a streamer or whatever. Or you could go in there and say, this is what I normally tie, Tiemco 100, you know, standard dry fly hook, but I've got no Tiemco. So then what it will spit out is the same fly in, you know, Orvis, Daichi, Dairiki, or all the other brands. And people keep telling me that I need to add a few brands. I need to add Fulling Mill, Firehole, Sticks, and a few other brands. So when I get time, I will go back and add those brands. But yeah, at the moment, there's probably, I don't know, eight or nine of the main brands on me.
Katie
I might have to use this because I'm also not a very experienced fly tire. It's something I pick up in the winter, and then I tend not to do much the rest of the year. But I've got like a book that I follow, and I'll go through the patterns, and they'll tell you what hook to use, but I don't always have that specific hook. So I might be using that tool to figure out, translate it to, okay, well, I've got this brand of hook. what's the closest thing to what they've got in this book that I'm reading through.
Rick
You sound exactly like me. And that's the very first use case that we built it for effectively. Yeah. It was that reason. Because you look up a pattern and it says a brand that you don't use. So what are you going to do?
Katie
I mean, that's almost, I know this is kind of a tangent, but that's a frustrating thing in fly tying, just outside of hooks too. You know, it calls for very specific material, like this exact color, this exact type of material, even down to the brand sometimes. And you're like, I've got, you know, what I picked up at the fly shop earlier today. So how can I make this work? And I feel like... Yeah, yeah, you've got to improvise. Yeah, you've got to figure out the closest thing and hope. I mean, at the end of the day, the fish probably don't care that much if you tied it according to the recipe.
Rick
Yeah, I know. Yeah, and you could even improve the fly, I suppose, accidentally. But I found with the hooks, it does matter. Like I was tying these clink hammer flies, like a sparsely hack hook fly for Tazzy. And I tied, I thought, oh, curved hooks. I've got some curved hooks and I just tied them on these hooks, but they turned out to be like grubber hooks. And, of course, I cast my fly out and they just sink to the bottom because of what it's like because I wasn't a real, you know, you can get really nerdy with all this stuff and I probably sound like an idiot, but I tied it in like 2X heavy, which is like the wire is much heavier gauge. So, of course, it sinks. So, yeah, and now I've put in the clean camera hooks in the tool so that you don't make the same mistake I did and waste a whole bunch of material on dry flies that are going to sink.
Katie
Right.
Rick
Which is not much good to anyone.
Katie
Unless you're going for an emerger.
Rick
Yeah, yeah.
Katie
All right, Rick. Well, remind everyone what your website is, and if they want to find you on social media, where is a good place for that?
Rick
Yeah. Okay, so the best place – so the website is tacklevillage.com, just as it sounds. And the tool, if you want to access the tool, it's linked from the top right. I think I've got a tab called tools there. Anyway, I'll send you the URL for the tool. And yeah, if you want to find us on social media as well, the only other property we've got is Facebook, which is just Facebook forward slash tackle village. And I have a YouTube channel as well, where I put some of my flight patterns and various other bits and pieces. Again, you probably search for that under tackle village. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's me. That's how to find me. Yeah. And if you need to reach me, want to ask questions about fishing in Japan or anyone wants to ask about Tazzy, Japan or New Zealand, I'm happy to help out as much as I can. The other thing I should tell you too is I don't have any relationship with these guys, but they're just friends. There is a good English language tackle store guiding operation in Japan called Trout and King, and I might give you the link to them as well just because, you know, you've been over there skiing. you sort of know what it, it's really, the language barrier can be difficult. So it's good to, like, even if you only fished with a guide for one day or something like it, at least it puts you on the right path. So I think it's probably useful for me to just give you that link just in case people want to, you know, go over to Japan. It probably is good to just have a contact that you can get started with.
Katie
Yeah, I was actually shocked at how much the language barrier came into play in Japan. Maybe this is just me being, you know, America-centric, but I just kind of assumed that English would be fairly common over there, just in, you know, another first world country that probably does a lot of business with the U.S. And I was really surprised at how little English people spoke, even in Tokyo, but even more so up in Hokkaido. It just was not very common. It was a lot of sign language.
Rick
Yeah, even in tourism, hey, there's not, yeah. And a lot of Japanese are very self-conscious about their English. And so if you write it, sometimes you'll get a better connection that way. But yeah, no, you're right. It is difficult with the language barrier. And Japanese is a very hard language to learn. Like I can speak a little bit of Japanese, but I'm by no means have a conversation with any degree of sophistication in Japanese.
Katie
Yeah, the plus side is they're very nice about it. So, you know, no hard feelings. No one can understand each other. But there's a lot of miscommunications and really struggling to convey something with your hands that you just can't get across.
Rick
Yeah, absolutely. The fishing people are very generous over there, though, too. They're really good. Two things. They're really good fly tiers, and they've adapted a lot of Western patterns for their own fisheries. They've tied with a lot of CDC and make some really innovative flies, and the fish are really selective. I remember fishing alongside a guy, a Japanese guy. He was catching fish after fish, rainbow and char, and I was just catching nothing, and it's just the same spot. And after an hour, he came over to me and just tapped me on the shoulder and he gave me one of his flies. And look, all it was was the elk hair caddis, but tied with, instead of the antron dubbing or whatever, it was just peacock hull under that. I think I had a CDC underwing. And just those two changes was enough to sort of trigger the feeding response. And he put his fly on and then just hooked up straight away.
Katie
And it was always fun to find those local patterns that are tied for that area. That's always a treat.
Rick
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. and I'm sure he sat there I wish he'd told me at the start of the end his thinking would be I don't want to embarrass this guy
Katie
well I'll link to all these things in the show notes go ahead and send over any links you have otherwise I can try to look them up and share them to your website and the outfitter you mentioned there I'll get those all linked up but I appreciate you coming on and thanks for spending your morning, my evening with me.
Rick
Yeah, no worries. Thanks for the opportunity, Katie. It was great. I love the podcast and what you're doing. It's terrific. So yeah, well done. And yeah, thanks for the opportunity.
Katie
Thank you. I appreciate it. All right, guys. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to head over to the website, fishuntamed.com for all episodes and show notes. And also please subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. That'll get my episodes delivered straight to your phone. And also, if you have not yet, please consider going over to Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating or review. That's very helpful for me, and I'd greatly appreciate it. Other than that, thank you guys again for listening, and I will be back in two weeks. Bye, everybody.
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