Rodrigo thought I should dispense with the niceties of dry fly fishing, slap on a Nere Nuff Whitlock Scuplin, and dredge subsurface without ceremony. At any rate, I was already believing most everything Rodrigo said because he'd spent his whole life fishing in this area, beginning as a boy wrapping monofilament around a coffee can.

One thing I love about operations like Estancia del Zorro is they give guys like Rodrigo the opportunity to share their local knowledge. It'd be easy enough for the owners to pack their two Chilean lodges with American guides-for-hire on snowbird hiatus from Montana and Alaska. I understand, too, that some folks, when they go fishing in far-flung places, want their guides to serve sandwiches with mayonnaise and American cheese, be conversant in American stock prices, and speak perfect English. But if I go to Chile to fish, I want to learn a little about Chile -beyond the flourishing wine selection - while I'm in the midst of it.

So the lodge's program of educating Chileans through an apprenticeship program and training them in the finer points of American fish-guiding is, to my thinking, a terrific thing for all involved, particularly the end-users (visiting anglers). And I appreciated it more sincerely every time Rodrigo spoke about his country. He talked of love gone wrong and fabulous adventures. He told me that his father was thrown in jail twice for not getting home by dark during the infamous curfews of the dictatorship -a chilling reminder that, even in this isolated outpost, Augusto Pinochet's grasp was never far away.
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