First, let me be clear. I am not a wealthy fellow. Quite the contrary. But, I am wealthy in other ways. One of my two sons is an avid fly fisherman like myself. He and his wife teach at an International School in Santiago, Chile. They travel to the US to visit us and have donated their miles to have my wife and I visit them in Chile. In addition, on three trips, they have arranged for my son and I to go on guided trips to the Patagonia Region of Chile to fly fish.
I provide this information in case someone else might consider going some day.
Santiago is a 9 1/2 hour flight from Dallas/Ft. Worth.
Once in Santiago, we fly LAN airlines in this plane for the 2 1/2 hour flight to Coyhaique, Chile which is considered by many to be the "heart of fly fishing" country on the Chilean side of Patagonia.......
The Regional Airport near Coyhaique is in Balcemeda, Chile which is approx. 20 miles north of Coyhaique. The in-flight video monitor indicates how far South in Chile we were going.
The flight takes you along the Andes Mountains toward Balcemeda and Coyhaique........
Our guide, Claudio Ramos was waiting for us at the airport. He is in the green shirt next to my son.
My son has used Claudio on about 6 trips since being in Chile and has developed a great friendship with him. I have been with Claudio all three of my trips.
Claudio is an independent guide. He is much more economical than the 4 Star Lodge options available. But, he is quite well known and has guided both Gary Borger and Dave Whitlock.
If you go with Claudio, you stay in his home in Coyhaique unless you are camping somewhere relatively remote from his home in which case, he sets up tents, etc.
If interested, at the end of this thread, I will supply more info about Claudio and how you could contact him.
We arrived at noon at the Balmaceda airport and Claudio took us directly to the Upper Simpson River for a shore lunch and an afternoon of fishing.
After lunch, we began fishing.
Not every fish in the Patagonia Region is a big fish. There are many different rivers of different sizes and different sizes of fish.
Claudio discusses the possibilities, based on weather, distance (which equates to fishing time), etc. As this was our first afternoon, we fished close to his home in order to get a full afternoon of fishing in before going to his home for dinner and our first night sleep.
This was a typical fish from that afternoon. The river held tremendous populations of both browns and rainbows. Some were larger than this one. This was a typical one. We did not see another fisherman all day. In fact, during the 6 days of fishing there, we only saw 2 other fishers and they were nearly out of sight.........
The rigging was a hopper/dropper until the fish seemed to hit just the hopper and then I switched to a hopper alone.
In the short afternoon, I know I caught over 20 fish and could have caught many more had I not taken time to enjoy the scenery and watch my son catch loads of fish too.
Day 2, we fished the Lower Simpson which was not very productive......although we caught fish. So, after our lunch, Claudio took us to the Manueles River which, in the section we fished, was faster water and better catching.
This was a "typical sized" Rainbow from that stream. There were also some nice, big browns and I lost a couple big ones..........