Our man in Argentina

Las Buiteras on the Rio Gallegos offers quite literally the best Sea Trout Fishing in the World.  Imagine the UK’s Border Esk when Hugh Falkus wrote ‘Sea Trout Fishing’ in the late 1970s and you will get a sense for what the Gallegos has to offer.  This is why WWMF take our teams to Argentina.  One of the last places on earth where, despite sometimes difficult weather conditions, there are fish in sufficient numbers for you to know that every cast covering the channel through a pool could result in a savage connection and a big fish!

Sea Trout on the Rio Gallegos emerged from the generous introduction of Brown Trout by an American angler in the late 1930s.  They grew to be of much greater average weight than in the Northern Hemisphere, feeding, as juveniles, on the prolific ephemerids in the river and on their plentiful coastal quarry in the South Atlantic before returning to spawn.  Late March (early Autumn in Argentina) tends to offer stable air pressure, temperature and wind and more, albeit generally smaller, fish than earlier in the Season, but there is always the chance of a Gallegos Leviathan! 

By any measure, the Where Wise Men Fish Team who visited Las Buiteras at the end of March this year had an incredible week: 110 Sea Trout bigger than 2lbs (the smaller fish are not recorded in the Lodge Catch return) between 10 anglers overall and at least as many brown trout, some of them specimens in their own right.  Almost all the Sea Trout were fresh, or new to the River.  These figures are all the more extraordinary given the unseasonally cold weather and higher water along with a wildly fluctuating (generally falling) barometer throughout and indeed high winds in the middle of our week.

The six of us arrived through varied routes into Buenos Aires (BA) on the Friday before our fishing week started.  The long flight to Argentina is more than bearable, given the anticipation, and is followed, a day later, by the 3.5 hour regional connection to El Calafate.  But you leave temperatures in BA in the mid-20s to arrive in Patagonia with temperatures similar to Scotland in early March!  The layover in BA gives everyone the opportunity to see the sights and eat a steak or two – and there is no better place to do so.  Two of the Team arrived early and were able to make full use of the sight-seeing and cultural opportunities in this cosmopolitan metropolis. 

Las Buiteras is worth the wait.  Built and set up for fishers, it is an extremely comfortable venue with outstanding food and service throughout – unlike many lodges, food and alcohol are included, so there is no additional expense beyond tips at the end of the week.  But it is the fishing enterprise which is most impressive. 

Lawson Jones the Camp Manager, grew up fishing and guiding on the Welsh Sea Trout Rivers before running a successful engineering business which he sold to give him more time to fish.  He is just the man you need – obsessed with Argentinian Sea Trout and Patagonian wildlife, he is surrounded by 6 carefully-selected and personally trained guides, all of whom know the river inside out – where and how to fish at a particular height, and in quite literally any weather conditions.  They are personable, kind and have excellent English; importantly they are also phenomenal fishers in their own right – they love what they do and want to be part of each guest’s story and by the end of the week they are close friends.

Las Buiteras has over 40km of fishing split into 6 beats. Some beats have great holding water, on others you are looking to intercept running fish and each pf them perform differently on a given day depending on the conditions, but generally over a season catches are evenly distributed between them.  The Fishing Day is split into two sessions – morning and afternoon/ evening punctuated by lunch and a ‘break’ to ensure that you are on your mettle!  You fish a different beat for each session, which means that you have fished each beat twice (morning and afternoon/ evening) by the end of the week.

Tactics depend on the Conditions and in our case we faced higher, colder water than the norm and were on sinking tips, short leaders and big flies – black, chartreuse and yellow were the ‘go-tos’, with the good old Sunray Shadow, or similar Nordic ‘long-tail’, the top performers.  In wind, the waves whip up the silt and the river adopts ‘local colour’ which sometimes means going bigger and more colourful to optimise your chances.  As the week progressed and the river fell there was scope to be more stealthy – intermediate tips, long leaders and smaller flies – rubber legged nymphs and smaller sunrays being very much the preference.  All fished slowly to reflect the low water temperature.

Overall, our team were of mixed experience and there were a couple of relative novices; Las Buiteras welcomes them and it is a great place to learn – in the end everyone caught fish and one of our novices had a fish of almost 18lbs from the Bridge Pool on Beat 3 just before dark!  For those with more experience, the Gallegos has a disproportionate effect on skill – it is after all the ‘Sea Trout University’ and what you learn can be taken away and applied to anadromous fishing successfully elsewhere.  The experience improves your casting, because you have to learn how to operate in high winds in one moment and a flat calm in the next; it improves stealth and teaches you to think about what the fly looks like to the fish – to move it in a way which is going to induce a take - and it improves your ability to hook and play a fish even when air and water temperature make the Sea Trout less active and therefore disinclined to solidly commit.     

Las Buiteras remains my favourite place on earth to fish – it overcomes the gloomy prognosis for migratory fish in the UK and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere and gives you hope that in conditions which favour conservation and habitat a healthy population of big Sea Trout can be sustained in a responsible way.  It also tests you – the conditions can be hard, but fish them patiently and with the advice of the Guides and the river will reward you; if not immediately (these are wild and wily fish after all) then at a time of their choosing!  What IS guaranteed is that hook a Rio Gallegos Sea Trout and you are going to have a battle on your hands.  A 4lbr fights like a fish twice its size on any other river and I will leave you to imagine the tussle you might have with one of the Gallegos’s 20lbrs.  Needless to say, more of the really big fish are lost than are landed and we hooked and chased at least 5 in our week, although we happily did net one 20lbr and many other double figure fish. 

WWMF are going again next year – Alistair is taking a hosted group back to Las Buiteras between 28 March and 3 April 2027, so book your place and experience this magical fishing for yourself.  There is absolutely nowhere like it and all those who came in 2026 want to return, which rather speaks for itself.  Satisfied smiles are guaranteed!