Rio Limay 

December 4

Michael and I went fly fishing while in Bariloche with Trout Bariloche. You all know that this is not a legit travel blog – so I’m not being paid by anyone to tout any product. That said – here is a huge advertisement to the ten people that are going to read this: come to Bariloche and go fly fishing with Juanito from Trout Bariloche. Juanito is the tallest Argentinian we’ve seen over the past month. He’s possibly 6’5″, but out of the three of us we couldn’t quite figure out how to convert his height from meters to feet without the internet or a calculator. The point – his name translates to “little John” which I thought was hilarious. 

Juanito picked us up from our AirBNB at 8:15 in the morning and we drove out to Rio Limay for some fly fishing. Juanito had a boat, a few coolers and our rods with him. Juanito put our boat in the river and off we went – with him rowing us down the river. We stopped almost immediately to learn the basics. Ultimately, it is super technical what we should be doing. Michael is good at it and I am less good at it. But – it has nothing to do with strength, so it’s not that I’m a wimpy girl – I’m just bad at it. No problem. It was such a treat just being on the water, that I didn’t care that I was struggling with casting. This video does not do Michael’s cast justice. It was really beautiful. Juanito kept geeking all over how great Michael was doing and kept teaching him new techniques. 

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I’m a natural:

So we didn’t catch much – Michael caught a small rainbow trout, then I caught a small rainbow trout, then Michael caught a second small rainbow trout. 

Mike asked Juanito what they do with the fish. Juanito told him that “we kiss them and then we put them back in the water”

In addition to the fishing, we also got a river side meal – Juanito cooked us steak (true story) and we had a meat and cheese plate, Malbec, salad and some dessert. Pretty fancy for a fishing trip. Note: those are not whimp hot dogs. They are spicy sausages. 

That’s right – we ate on a table cloth. 

After lunch, we were super pumped about what we caught for the day, but Juanito wanted more for Michael (because Michael. was doing so well… he was thrilled that I picked up the one I did). So we moved into Juanito’s favorite spot on the river and spent some time there. I was finally starting to feel like my casting was getting a bit better. I wasn’t casting far, but it was solid. I had a bite and Juanito told me to cast the same way I previously cast. So I did. And I got her. 

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And if you can’t tell… I was excited. 

I may have mentioned this when I talked about the humpback whales that we saw in Antarctica from the ship, but one of the things I loved about that moment was that all of the crew got their cameras out as well. They were just as excited as we were and that didn’t happen for other sightings. To me, it meant that we were seeing something special. Similarly, Juanito was pumped about this fish and I loved that! He thought it was the biggest he’s seen this season so far. So that was cool. 

I’ll end this post by paraphrasing something Juanito said at the end of the trip – If you combine Michael’s casting with my fishing, we’d have the perfect fisherman. I think it’s probably more like mixing Michael’s casting with my good luck!