Wellington Flyfishers Club

Life feels challenging for many New Zealanders right now.

A recent national Stuff survey found that nearly half of New Zealanders experienced anxiety in the past month. Four in ten reported feeling overwhelmed, while nearly as many said they struggled to switch off or relax mentally.

There is however some encouraging news. Recent Fish & Game research, the largest study of its kind globally, found that active anglers were 52% less likely to experience psychological distress and 46% less likely to experience anxiety. The benefits were even greater among those who fished more frequently.

If life has been feeling a bit overwhelming lately, it might be worth grabbing your fishing licence and rod and heading to your local lake or river. A few hours on the water could be just what you need.



Link to Fish & Game study results:https://www.fishandgame.org.nz/assets/Fishing/Follow-the-Fish-News-Events/Fishing-News-Events/Media-release-Worlds-largest-angling-mental-health-study-reveals-remarkable-benefits/27615-FG-Mental-Health-Fact-Sheet-Sep25-Proof3.pdf

To find fisheries that are currently open, check out the latest sports fishing regulations:
North Island:https://www.fishandgame.org.nz/assets/Fishing/Fishing-Licences-Regulations/Fishing-Regulations/27549-FG-NORTH-island-fishing-regulations-2025-2026.pdf
South Island: https://www.fishandgame.org.nz/assets/Fishing/Fishing-Licences-Regulations/Fishing-Regulations/27549-FG-south-island-fishing-regulations-2025-2026.pdf

🟠🔴 Review: Flytying Night Monday 15th June 2026 🔴🟠

After the great turnout for May’s pheasant tail session, we weren’t sure how popular the Glo Bug would be. In the end, heavy rain and strong winds kept numbers down, with only new junior members, their mum and a fellow clubmember attending.

Although the Glo Bug can be tricky to tie, the two juniors quickly mastered it and produced some excellent flies for their boxes. Their mother also joined in and tied several impressive examples of this popular winter pattern.

🌸Flytying tonight - Fly of the month: The Glo Bug🌸

When: tonight Monday 15 June at 7.30pm
Where: Tararua Tramping Club, 4 Moncrief Street, Mount Victoria (access through side door on north side of building in the downstairs locker room).

🌸Fly of the month: The Glo Bug🌸

Winter fishing for many of our club members is predominantly directed to fishing the Taupo and Rotorua areas.

Glo bugs are a very popular and easy pattern to tie and should be in any Taupo winter fisher's flybox.

We have had a number of requests to repeat previous flytying sessions relating to popular Taupo patterns.

Members welcome.

🎏 Monthly Club Trip Report, Turangi 5-7 June 2026

The long-range forecast was not promising, but Strato, Jarek, and Phil decided to make the trip anyway.

Arriving early on Friday, they found the Tongariro low, fishable, and relatively uncrowded. A quick visit to the local fishing shop confirmed that fishing had been difficult. Strato fished his favourite wet-line spots, with a Red Setter attracting seven fish, two of which were kept for the smoker. Phil landed the best fish of the day, a superb 5lb rainbow in excellent condition. 🌈🐋👌

Heavy rain overnight transformed conditions. 🌧🌧🌧 The Tongariro rose from around 35 cumecs to over 300, 😮 making it unfishable, while the Waimarino and Tauranga Taupo were also blown out. The Hinemaiaia, however, remained clear, attracting large numbers of anglers. Most were fishing glo-bugs, while Euro nymphing and weighted rigs proved effective. Jarek enjoyed a productive day, landing eight fish, while Strato, having left his Euro nymphing gear and glo-bugs at home, struggled for one. Phil also landed a fish, this time a beautiful 6lb rainbow. 🌈🐋👏

Sunday brought fine weather and light winds, but the rivers remained high and dirty. The group tried the Waitahanui, finding it fishable and quiet, though fishing was slow. After an hour they returned to the crowded Hinemaiaia. Strato and Phil then fished the river mouths of the Hinemaiaia, Tauranga Taupo, and Waipehi Stream, expecting fish to be stacked up after the rain, but neither had any success. Jarek, meanwhile, added another couple of fish to his tally.

Hopefully the next club trip to Turangi will bring better weather and fishing conditions.

🎣 Report: Club Trip Manawatū River, 22-24 May 2026 🎣

Being new to flyfishing, Shaz and myself have watched plenty of videos and spent may hours beside the river trying to learn the art. The May club trip to Dannevirke to fish the Manawatū was our first opportunity to get out on the river with experienced flyfishers and learn directly from the best.

Five of us made the trip up for the weekend with myself and Shaz joined by Strato, Phil and Jarek. We stayed at the Dannevirke Domain in a small A-Frame style bunk chalet. The groundsman Tony was very proud and excited about his smoker that could easily fit two whole cows.

We took the Friday off work and headed up early, meeting Strato at the campground around noon. Strato had headed up earlier to scout and have a quick fish himself. We were excited to hear he had had a successful morning of fishing using green woolly buggers. A promising start to the weekend, even if nothing landed was over 2lb. Strato generously lent Shaz one of his rods and we followed him off to the first of many fishing spots.

We settled on a stretch of river that had some good spots for both nymphing and downstream wet lining. I started with the nymphs and after being pointed in the right direction, I got some early excitement with a quick tug on my line after only a few casts. While nothing was hooked, this was the first time a fish had decided that one of my nymphs looked appealing enough to take a bite. Shortly after this Strato got one hooked and handed the rod over to Shaz to get some experience reeling a fish in. It was a good fight, but ultimately the fish broke off when it saw the net, a common theme of the weekend to come. I had my first taste of success and managed to hook and land my first trout 🥇using the fly, a nice looking rainbow. 🌈With this early success we headed back to the campground and meet up with Phil. He had also fished on his way up and managed to land a few small rainbows and one good sized brown. Jarek would not be joining us until the following evening.

The weather all weekend was wonderful, clear skies and no wind.🌞 The fishing on Saturday was rather slow. We spent the first half of the day at a spot new to Strato. There was no interest in the nymph, so after a good fight with a sunken tree I switched to the wet line. Strato had been using the wet line with the green woolly buggers 🐛 from the start, he landed one good sized rainbow with a number of others striking but quickly getting off. The culprit was determined to be a hook with no barb. 🪝 We tried a few other spots with no success until late in the afternoon. Here we had a good run with Strato landing quite a few small rainbows. While I didn’t land anything myself, I had multiple strikes and one good fight with a large brown who got off the hook upon seeing my net. 🐟👋

Jarek joined us later having spent the day fishing some of his preferred spots. Like the rest of us, it had been a slow day but with some success stories to share. While the fishing may have been slow, that didn’t bring the mood down around the dinner table with many stories, laughing and lots of good food starting with S such as sausages stew, soup, etc.

A final fish on the Sunday morning was also slow with no strikes for myself. Shaz had a bit more success with a few nudges but nothing getting hooked. The highlight of the morning was Strato landing a 3lb rainbow Jack. 🎣 Later in the afternoon he found some success with excellent numbers of fish.

The fishing may have been slow, but it was an excellent weekend all round. The weather was perfect 🌞and the company excellent. We felt welcomed and supported by experienced flyfishers who helped guide us to landing our first fish. We are looking forward to many more club trips in the future. 😃

~ Thomas

Report: Onstream Day, Saturday 30 May 2026

The spell of beautiful weather 🌞 was very encouraging but the Hutt River is the lowest I have seen it in May for a long time.

Acknowledging the fact that most of the larger fish would have already been travelling upstream to enjoy the intricacies of spawning and with the water being very cold and little sign of insect life, we decided to try wet lining with favourite green woolly buggers.🐛

We first started off fishing below the bridge at Sladden Park which was wide and featureless and talking to a local angler who had fished it recently, it had not been very productive and we didn’t touch anything.

We then shifted to Stokes Valley fishing downstream from the carpark and one beautiful 4lb brown came to the net. 🐟

One of the lads had a couple of other touches and a short battle with one lively fish but that was the only other action for the day.

A beautiful day to be out on the water which made the lack of fish numbers less important.

~ Strato

🎣 Monthly Club Meeting - Kings Birthday Monday 1 June 2026🎣

The Club's June meeting will be a video dvd presentation on Wilderness fishing in the Nelson area.

All welcome.😊

🚩 Monday 1 June 7.30pm
Tararua Tramping Club rooms - 4 Moncrieff St, Mount Victoria, Wellington.

🎣📒Report: Wellington Flyfishers Club AGM & Prizegiving 📒🎣

The club’s AGM was held on Monday May 4th and was attended by an excellent number of members.

Prior to the AGM formalities, Strato gave a presentation on the fundamentals of flyfishing and what are the main requirements if you want to join the 10% who catch 90% of the fish.

The AGM followed normal procedure with President Heather Miller referring to her President’s Report published in the magazine followed by Carmen Cotsilinis’ treasurer’s report which showed the club’s finances continued to stay strong.🧮📑

🎏 2026 Trophy winners 🎏

🏆🐟 Wellington Flyfishers Club Competition Cup - Jarek Jurasz

🏆🐟 Heaviest Trout Trophy - Susi Lang - 7lb

🏆👌Best Condition Factor - Paul Baker - CF 68

🏆📸 Photographic Competition - Brian Benson

President Heather announced that the President’s Trophy 🏆 💯 for the year was to go to Jan Simmons for her constant attendance at club events and at the Capital Trout Centre and for the making of covers for the outdoor seats at the Capital Trout Centre. 👏

🪝The flybox raffle 🐛🐜🐝🪲🐞🦗🪳which had been running for some time was drawn and won by Phil Haslam 🪲with ticket number 125.👏

Committee members were nominated and confirmed by the meeting and President Heather expressed thanks for their services to outgoing committee members.

~ Strato

Ed. Big thanks to Strato 🏆and Carmen 🏆 for all their hard work keeping the wheels of the club running. 💯💪

A Brother’s Visit 🇬🇷 ✈️ 🇳🇿

A visit from my brother Costa from Greece 🇬🇷 in early April to attend mum’s 100th birthday 💯🏆🎂🔥 and also a school reunion at Dannevirke, also gave us the opportunity to do a bit of fishing together on the Tukituki and the Manawatu rivers. 🐟🎣

Costa had done a bit of fishing with me over the years, virtually all of which was downstream wet lining and his limited mobility placed some restriction on where we could fish.

I’d decided we would use size 8 green woolly buggers 🪲on teeny 200 lines in the hope that the larger flies would limit our catches to larger fish.

That supposition proved totally false as everywhere we went these large green woolly buggers were attacked by small rainbows (half pound) which somehow managed to get hooked on what is one of my most productive flies in my fly box when fishing wet lines.🤔

Each one would hit the line with such vigour that you were sure that you had caught something reasonable but the aerial jumps soon proved otherwise. Getting the hook out of the mouths of these small rainbows was often difficult.

Over the two and a half days of fishing, 49 of these small ones 🐟🐟🐟🧮 came to the net with many others lost.

Fishing the Tukituki was not so productive as many of the places we tried already had anglers fishing, despite the fact that it was mid-week. Obviously, the news the Tukituki was fishing well this season is well known. The Manawatu on the other hand was far more productive and we both caught good numbers of fish up to 4lb which was very satisfying for my brother. 😃

We had hoped to do more fishing before he returned to Greece but the diabolical weather 🌬🌀🌧 made this impossible.

I’ll now have to look forward to his next trip.

Apologies for no photos from the trip. Costa took all the photos but unfortunately left his camera on the bank of the Manawatu. 😩

~ Strato

🪝🪳Flytying review: Tying the Pheasant Tail Nymph

The Pheasant Tail Nymph is one of the most popular nymphs used by flyfishing anglers throughout the world.👍

The club’s flytying night on Monday 18th May was aimed at teaching how to tie this pattern which over the years has had numerous adaptations.

The attendance on the night was probably the largest we have experienced for many years ranging from new Junior member Leo to more senior flytyers.

Fortunately, with the help of Ross Gigg, Braedan de Lange and Scott Garelli, those who attended made a number of attempts at tying this fly, which hopefully they found worthwhile.

~ Strato