On the final morning of a weeklong fly-fishing adventure to Patagonia last December, I finally found my white whale. In the preceding days, I had fished all manner of beautiful rivers and lakes and caught (and released) more than my share of fish. But I had yet to land anything truly special — a trip-maker — and this creature appeared to be just that.
My guide, an American expatriate named Monte Becker, his colleague, Hayden Dale, and I were on the Paloma River, a renowned trout stream in central Chile. We had begun the day by navigating a series of Class III rapids, then catching a handful of brown trout and rainbow trout that would have been considered whoppers on most other rivers, but here were just the latest in a series of ho-hum catches measuring 18 inches or more. READ MORE
