Fishing Serrano River in Chile Jan 2011

As some of you know, I took a Southen Hemiphere fishing trip in January. I was invited by my one of my guiding friends in Sweden who holds the record for the largest salmon caught around Stockholm. The idea was to try fishing some new areas that hadn’t had much traffic fishing. We started off in Punta Arenas which is at the southern end of Chile. Except for the city of about 100,000, the rest of the area is sparsely populated. I was a little surprised when I arrived how poor the area was. I found out that people in South America make about one third to one half what people in Canada and the US do.

The first part of the trip we went fishing for Chinook in the rivers. It is not really my favorite thing to do, but as Chinook are recent settlers down it this part of the world, I thought I would give it a try. There were lots of fish, but also lots of fisherman. There was a catch and release rule in effect, but this doesn’t mean much to the locals when there is no enforcement. So we were the only ones doing catch and release! There seemed to be some pretty good numbers of Chinook in this area. We fished the Serrano River which was about a 5 hour drive on both paved and gravel roads. You will have to get used to traveling on gravel roads if coming to Chile. It doesn’t mean less traffic, just potholes and bumps!

The first afternoon we got there, there were only a few people there and I caught 3 Chinook on spoons after getting tired of seeing fish being caught on spoons and not getting anything on the fly. One of the guys managed to get one on a fly, but there wasn’t too much happening. The next couple days were very slow and we ended up leaving in hopes of getting some brown trout in the Tierra Del Fuego area. This is a really a big island that Chile and Argentina share. I am not entirely sure of the history, but apparently there was some agreement that Chile couldn’t have land on the east side of the peninsula.