I'm just back in the winter world, after a three week summer sojourn to Chile and Argentina. It was a great trip, and I think it can be done more easily and cheaply than some people expect. Many friends have asked for some details, so I'll tell a bit of the story.
The trip started when a friend was taken on a cruise with his family from Buenos Aires to Santiago. After the trip, an effort by his parents to spend the kids inheritance, he wanted to stay down and see more of the area. At a drastically different cost, I might add, since he is recently retired and careful with his spending.
I offered to come down and split the cost of renting a car and look for some fishing. Trip on! We agreed to meet in Puerto Montt, Chile and go from there. Round trip airfare from Bend Oregon to Puerto Montt was $1630. I scheduled 20 days, including arrival and departure days.
Researching the trip we found three areas of interest, the Lake District of Chile near Puerto Montt, the area south around Cohhaique, and the area around Bariloche, Argentina. We figured we could do two of the three.
Many descriptions we found compared Chile to the Pacific NW, and Argentina to Montana. This comparison proved quite accurate, and because we would be camping a fair bit we decided to spend most of our he trip in Argentina. Accounts of taking a rental car from Chile to Argentina ranged from difficult to impossible. It took weeks of emails and raised the truck rental from $1009 to $1265, but we eventually did get all the paperwork and were able to do a big loop into Argentina and back. The vehicle was perfect—a small king cab diesel truck which had scratches and dents everywhere. It was 2WD but had good clearance and suspension.
Neither of us were seeking trophy trout. You see a lot of photos of Patagonian monsters, but they often come from lakes, sea run estuaries, and bigger rivers, All those venues are expensive, require a boat, and tend to be wind blasted. We were looking for aesthetic mountain streams with good dry-fly opportunities. We just wanted to do some mid-summer fishing in February.
This strategy paid off nicely. For example, on the Puelo, a larger river in Chile, we decided it was too big and windy, and a bit off color. We fished a smaller tributary, the Puelo Chico and caught a zillion trout on light rods. That night we had a room next to a group who spent all day with a guide and a boat chasing big trout and salmon but were skunked. We repeated that success everywhere. We fished 19 spots, and caught fish at 17 of them. Many of the spots were what I consider “Holy Grails”, small clear streams with abundant smaller trout hiding in all the proper places, with the ever-present chance of a big one where you least expect it. Camping on the rivers gave us access to some great evening caddis hatches as well as some early morning stupid fish, who would take anything big and loud on top.
I returned home and found a big catalog of Patagonia fishing trips in the mail. The price ranges from $4700 to $7900 for six days of fishing. We did 19 days of daily fishing and site-seeing for $1610 each, including the truck rental. How did we do it so cheap? Well, we camped 12 nights, often in undeveloped spots. We cooked over a camp stove and only hit restaurants when we passed through a town. We had the best wine we could find, but they usually topped out at $10 a bottle.
I guess no write up on this forum would be complete without a plug for glass rods. I brought four rods:, a Tenkara rod for small pocket water, a 7’8” Aventik 4 wt. 4 piece glass rod, a 7 ½ ‘ Fenwick Voyageur FF756-4, and a 9’ 5wt graphite rod, which is really a 6 wt. I wanted rods that were not too valuable if they were lost or stolen, and all but the 9’ rod fit in my carry on. The graphite rod was good for casting big stuff in the wind, but really boring for the smaller fish. It didn’t get used much. The FF 756-4 was great, it cast dry flies and hopper-droppers on windy afternoons and did not feel like overkill for smaller fish. It was my main rod. The Aventik 4 wt was the most fun to cast and catch with, and really proved its worth when I hooked a 20” brown on a #18 partridge and orange soft hackle. The fish was a bit downstream on 6X tippet and that full flex rod was great . I tried to leave most fish in the water, and I lost a camera, but I'll photobucket up some photos of the trip.
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