Salmon Fishing on the East Coast

Hey guys. Unfortunately, Roberta got some bad news and had to head back to Canada for her Grammy’s funeral. It’s a real shame that things like this have to happen, but I guess there is no alternative. She will be thoroughly missed by all the people she touched in her life. At the time my parents were due to come in a couple of days, so I wasn’t able to go along.

I had 3 days between getting Roberta to the airport in Christchurch and picking up my parents in Christchurch. I knew I didn’t really want to hang out in the city for those days, so I decided that I would try and catch a salmon since I heard they had been running a bit better than the previous few years. None of the stores were open by the time I got Roberta on her way so I headed up to the Waimakariri River (yeah its a mouthful) since it was only about 15 kms north of Christchurch. Got some tips from the locals there who said that the Rakaia and the Rangitata rivers were fishing better at the moment, so I decided to head south the next day.


I stopped at a fishing store and got the appropriate tackle for the job and headed to the Rakaia river. Since it was Sunday afternoon, there was shoulder to shoulder people fishing out on the mouth of the river. Most had quite the fancy casting rods and were able to get quite far out there. I had my light, lucky rod Roberta got me for Christmas. I caught a few kahawai and my line broke on what I now think may have been a salmon. The guy beside me caught a fairly good sized salmon, but that was the only one caught that day. I decided to just camp out on the beach for the night and get up early for a fish when hopefully there were fewer people and more salmon.

Mouth of the Rakaia

A couple of quads went by at 5:45 a.m. which awakened me and I decided that it would be a good time to head to the mouth which was about a kilometer walk. There were just two guys down there when I got there. I had a good feeling about the chartreuse spoon and even fumbled around with it for quite a few minutes to get an appropriate swivel on it. After about 5 casts, I felt a bite and so I set the hook. The drag on my line immediately started to zing so I knew it was a decent sized fish but didn’t know what kind. After it had taken me down the beach a bit and I had been fighting with it for 10 minutes I saw it was a nice big salmon! It was hard for me (being inexperienced at ocean fishing) to bring it in with all the surf coming in and I was quite worried about losing it. A guy finally came over and pushed it up the bank after a wave rolled out. I was pretty pumped! My first salmon and it was quite big, though I wasn’t sure how big. Now I had to figure out what to do with this huge thing since I didn’t have anything big enough to store it in. I got talking to a local guy named Simon who ended up taking me back to his place so I could have somewhere to cut this big pig into steaks. We weighed my fish and it was over 19 lbs!! Not bad for my first one.

The Scale did go to 19.5