INCHBONNIE, NEW ZEALAND

THE TROUT AND THE LODGE ARE BOTH WINNERS

Author: By M. R. Montgomery, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 4, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

Grubb and his wife, Marian van der Goes, operate the Lake Brunner Lodge a few miles from Inchbonnie ``station.'' This is a place of nearly sinful luxury (``understated country luxury,'' as Time magazine has put it, but sin is always best left understated). Posh as it is, guests do tend to end up thinking of it as Ray and Marian's place.

You could drive to Lake Brunner Lodge easily enough if you don't mind right-hand-drive and the road over Arthur's Pass (another proof that Kiwis are first-name folk), which is, simply put, a religious experience if you have a tinge of vertigo in your soul. However you get there, you enter a world where rare native birds sing in the trees and walk across the lawn; where gourmet meals appear on the table as if you were in some international capital, not nestled in a huge range of protected rain forest.

But for an angler, this is cake decoration. A sporting lodge has been on the site since the mid-19th century, when it was a six-day stagecoach trip from Christchurch to Lake Brunner. The reason is simple: This stretch of the western side of South Island has more trout streams and rivers and lakes per square mile than any place on earth. It's the rain, hitting the mighty Southern Alps, and the consistent cool breezes coming in off the Tasmanian Sea that provide the chill waters that are the first requirement in a trout's life.

The real test of a fishing lodge and a fishing guide is not what happens in the best of all possible worlds. It is what happens to a guest when everything out of man's control is on the fritz. It was not by intention that we traveled halfway around the world to see what Ray Grubb could do in adversity, it was El Nino's idea. Winter (our summer months up here) is supposed to be windy and rainy in New Zealand's Westland. But at the beginning of December, 1997 (our first of June, weatherwise), El Nino brought 100-year floods to the Southern Alps. They had subsided, but barely, when we got off the train at Inchbonnie.

New Zealand is famous the world over for a particular type of trout fishing: very big trout that are perfectly visible so that the angler and guide know exactly what they're fishing for. The big rivers of the West Coast that are usually, in the inevitable metaphor, gin-clear, were not. In the cocktail line, they would have been anything from Margaritas to White Russians (fruit juice to chocolate milk in teetotaling similies).

This kind of weather can be disastrous. For example, similar El Nino weather (that's the usual culprit this winter) in October 1997 hit the Yellowstone River Valley of Montana while I was there, turning the river into something resembling a cross between cappuccino and buttermilk. They were holding an international fly-fishing tournament on the Yellowstone that week, and 144 world-class anglers fished for two days on the Yellowstone without catching a single trout. If Ray was going to uphold New Zealand's reputation, he had his work cut out for him.

The salvation, when things like this happen, is extensive personal knowlege of every bit of running water in the neighborhood. This requires a variety of streams and creeks to choose among, and the forests and farm fields around Lake Brunner had the necessary mix. ``We will begin,'' Ray announced after breakfast, ``at Robbie's.''

Robbie turned out to be a dairy farmer, and near his milking parlor we parked by a tiny trickle of clear water. It was the first of many springs that would, within a few hundred yards, mingle into something big enough to be called a ``spring creek.'' Ray apologized slightly for the water (``Not perfectly clear, I'm afraid.'') and the size of the trout we could expect to find (``Hardly big, but this is our only chance today, with the weather.'').

There is no point in falsely interjecting suspense into a fishing story. Either you catch fish or you don't. We did, and the plural is accurate. Ray could spot dark-colored trout lying over dark weed beds as well as if they were goldfish in a pail. He could teach the art of very-short-cast flyfishing in five minutes (on average, we crept and waded up to within 15 feet of the trout).

And in a longish half-day of fishing, interspersed with rain showers, we caught the largest trout in the visitor's 45 years of angling. For that matter, of the half-dozen largest trout in my life, number one, and also three through six, came out of Robbie's spring creek in the section where the average, so-so trout lived. We could not fish where the big ones were; the El Nino storms had backed muddy water up out of the main river into the larger lower end of his spring creek. In sum, one fair to average day in New Zealand can be the equivalent, for big fish, of a fair to average angler's entire career in North America -- provided he knows Ray Grubb.

Over five days, we tried different places and found a few huge fish, almost all of which we hooked and none of which were landed. Eight- pound trout living under a log will come up and eat a trout fly, but they plan on digesting it back underneath the log, a haven from which they cannot be extracted with a leader that has a breaking-strength half the weight of the fish. We did, however, net fish that would have been bragging size in most of the extensive world of angling.

Much of the fun was in fooling these enormous and wary trout; landing a huge one is always a rarer event. El Nino simply didn't give us the number of chances it would take to put a monster on the bank for the usual photographic opportunity.

The rest of the pleasure came from the surroundings. Trout often live in handsome places, but not always. In New Zealand, the only country I have visited that looked better than the photographs in the travel brochures, the fish swam in rivers of various glories. If you wanted an Izaak Walton experience, there were meadow rivers with shepherds and lowing cattle (we could not find one of Walton's dainty shepherdesses, but many of the cattle were old English breeds -- Devons and Ayrshires and Jerseys). There were roaring mountain brooks and, most peculiar, clearing rivers that flowed gently between banks garnished with 20-foot-tall tree ferns. It was something like angling in the central greenhouse at Kew Gardens or the Brooklyn Botanical.

The most amazing thing, for a first-time visitor to New Zealand, was that this marvelous angling, these brooks and rivers with the trout of your life swimming in them, were not in some impenetrable wilderness. Yes, you can take a helicopter or a two-day hike to wonderful fishing, but you can have the time of your life a hundred yards off the pavement. If you know Ray Grubb.