FLY ROD & REEL Magazine
Never Been Fished - Chilean Patagonia
Never been fished, nearly every fisherman I talked to in Chilean Patagonia spoke of streams that had never been fished. And the concept didn't ever seem unusual to any of them. A man in Coyhaique asked me if I knew any Americans potentially interested in investing in a lodge operation. He wanted to offer spike camps to fish rivers that didn't even have names.
Two weeks after I had returned home from fishing in Chile's vast, sparsely populated region of Patagonia, I spoke on the phone with Jay Burgin, the American partner of Estancia del Zorro and Cinco Rios lodges near Coyhaique, where I had stayed.
"Just since you've been down here we've fond another spring creek," Burgin said. "It's never been fished that anybody knows. Not with a worm, a fly or dynamite caps. The guides went up into it and say there are 30-inch fish living there."And, even though these are fishermen speaking, I believe it.
Never been fished, nearly every fisherman I talked to in Chilean Patagonia spoke of streams that had never been fished. And the concept didn't ever seem unusual to any of them. A man in Coyhaique asked me if I knew any Americans potentially interested in investing in a lodge operation. He wanted to offer spike camps to fish rivers that didn't even have names.