Smithsonian.com

Andrew Bland casts for trout during a moment's peace between passing power boats and jet skis on Lake Wanaka. Mount Aspiring stands in the background, untroubled by the commotion. Photo by Alastair Bland.

“I am haunted by waters.”

Many fly fishermen spend their spare moments wishing they had been the first to say that, but Norman Maclean beat them to it, hammering home his trout fishing classic A River Runs Through It with that final thundering line. But it doesn’t matter who said it first, because we fishermen are haunted by waters: Precisely, I am haunted by the vision of a glassy emerald pool just below a fast run of rapids, back-dropped by pines and birch. Here, a feathery mayfly pattern falls and settles on the surface—a perfect cast—floats for two or three tense seconds, and finally vanishes in a forceful explosion of water, fins and the spotted green back of a rainbow trout.

That is the magic moment that has kept fishermen shuffling through waist-deep waters, rain or shine, dawn to dusk, for centuries. I can imagine the helpless longing that some early settler in New Zealand must have felt when he looked over a prime stretch of riffles bottoming out in a wide slow pool and grieved for the trout that could not be caught here—the trout he had left at home in the slow waters of England. When enough ex-anglers felt this same heartache, a decision, I suppose, was made: They called home, put in an order for some buckets of brown trout eggs on the next boat and so sealed history. The eggs were hatched in Tasmania, the fry sent to New Zealand and released in the Styx River. By the 1880s, New Zealand had become a trout fisherman’s paradise.

Somewhere in this glistening history, the first ring of a rising brown trout expanded across the glassy morning waters of Lake Wanaka, under the looming local peaks and, away in the northwest, the austere presence of Mount Aspiring. About a century after the trout, another nonnative species arrived in these quiet waters: the ski boat, so help us. Today, at almost any moment, dozens of these obscenities careen in perilous arcs through the bays and inlets of Wanaka’s lanky, long-armed figure. They send waves and screaming voices into the Zen-zone of the odd fisherman wading the shoreline, and the awful din of motors never ends. It drowns out the birds, the breeze, the sheep and the splashing of feeding trout, and these watercraft, in sum, have committed a serious offense in this would-be-sacred mountain hideaway: They have stolen the silence from Lake Wanaka.

But lakes and mountains have a patience that will transcend the human race, not to mention some festering little resort town and some clusters of RVs. So for now, Wanaka endures the boats wordlessly while Aspiring looks down in his expressionless way, a perfect geologic yogi. He does not frown upon us, for he knows that silence will return to his kingdom. We people may be a temporary mosquito bite on the Earth’s hide, while Mount Aspiring will keep on aspiring for ages. It’s true: Geologists say New Zealand’s Southern Alps—the most jagged range of summits I’ve ever seen—are still growing, and exceptionally quickly.

Over the past week, we went from Lake Wanaka south, past the Mavora Lakes and as far as Te Anau. We fished Lake Manapouri, Lake Te Anau, Gunn Lake, the Eglinton River and the Waiau River, the main drainage of Lake Te Anau. The Waiau is credited as hosting more trout per mile—about 400, according to a local man we met on the bank—than any river in the Southland. We were entirely alone there, standing waist-deep and throwing flies over the backs of dozens of monsters. Occasionally, one would lift off the bottom, grab an insect off the surface and drop back to its chosen holding spot. Our task was to determine what these fish were in the mood for, and we changed flies every five minutes. They ignored everything—our fluffy floating dry flies, our leach-like streamers and our sinking nymphs.

This stye of fishing is called “sight-casting”—the pursuit of fish plainly visible in the slow, still water. Andrew calls sight-casting “like walking through a petting zoo.” Big fish hold like sunken logs all across the stream, their noses aimed upstream, and we work on them one at a time. They rarely bat an eyelid at our offerings. Meanwhile, yin to the yang of sight-casting is “blind-casting,” in which the fisherman throws a fly into fast-moving or murky waters. As the fly line sweeps down-current, the tension is high, prone to being broken at any second by the explosion of a striking fish.

Waters that haunt: A classic run of New Zealand rapids is home to hulking browns and sleek rainbows. Here, fisherman Bob Stinson waits for that smashing strike. Photo by Michael Bland.

From New Zealand’s mountain country run fast-moving, blind-casting streams, but we’ve mostly been working the sluggish, clear streams of the lowlands, where we’ve spent day after day sight-casting at uninterested fish as large as pike. But we catch them sometimes. The other morning, Andrew caught and released a 24-inch brown that he had been working on since sunup. We had gotten to know it well over the hours, had named it Captain Cook, and didn’t have the heart to bonk our friend over the head. Cook still swims. But later that day, we were hungrier, and Andrew caught another big brown by the name of Captain Bligh. Bligh got braised that night with herbs de Provence and white wine. The next day, another monster the size of a poodle in the Waiau River would not bite. Andrew worked on him for a while with a streamer before waving me in to try with a dry fly. No luck—sight-casting at its most frustrating. “Oh, hell—let’s shoot him,” Andrew joked, both of us just 10 feet from that tedious old brown. That was Captain Tasman. Just to make sure he was alive we threw a cobblestone at him; he dashed downstream.

We’re back at Lake Wanaka now, on our way north. Andrew just came stomping in with wet feet—sullen, silent and soaked to the skin after spending eight hours in the rain standing in a river waving a stick. It’s been coming down all day, the first precipitation in two months here. Our socks, shoes, pants and rain gear are all soaked, our room smells like a swamp and we aren’t getting any drier. We’re headed next for the West Coast rainforest, and the forecast says rain for days. If this is what it means to be haunted by waters, then Norman Maclean can have his line back. We want sun.

You never know what you will find on the beaches of Malarrimo. Image courtesy of Graham Mackintosh

People campaign against plastic and volunteer on beach cleanup days—but what would Malarrimo Beach in Baja California be without its wonderful array of worldly garbage?

Trash of nearly every water-insoluble sort comes ashore on this far-flung stretch of sand. It’s on the north-facing shore of a conspicuous “horn” about halfway down the Baja Peninsula on the Pacific Coast side. The land juts sharply westward into the waters of the California Current, which generates a rich upwelling along the coast but also carries riches of different sort: boat wreckage, clothing, first-aid kits, military gear, toys, preserved foods and so many other curios. The attraction of beachcombing is that one isn’t perusing an actual garbage dump; much of what one sifts through on a remote stretch of sand are valuables lost at sea. Huge logs of Northwest timber, for instance, come ashore at Malarrimo, and there are probably several classy Baja palapas built of California redwood. Lucky beachgoers may find currency notes here and bottles of liquor, too. Happily, the place is far from the main roads of Baja and is very inconvenient to reach. One must turn west at the desert town of Vizcaino, drive 70 miles and then take on the final stretch—26 miles of bumpy unpaved dirt.

Of course, Graham Mackintosh, with whom I spoke last week about his Baja travels, walked to Malarrimo during his circumpeninsular foot tour in the early 1980s. Approaching the beach from the north, Mackintosh had to improvise his way across the mouths of several huge lagoons on Baja’s Pacific Coast—the famed breeding grounds of the Eastern Pacific gray whale. He hitched boat rides with commercial lobstermen and on one muddy shore even found an abandoned skiff in which he made another crossing. Finally, Mackintosh stepped onto the legendary sands of Malarrimo Beach, “reputed,” as he wrote in his book Into a Desert Place, “to offer the finest beachcombing in the world.”

He goes on: “The scene was incredible. It was as if some terrible and destructive battle had taken place off the coast. The shore was littered with planks, buckets, tree trunks, helmets, hatch covers, bits and pieces of boats and planes, and all kinds of military and medical equipment.”

He found canisters of nerve gas antidote, a coconut, contraceptives “and some kind of missile with wires hanging from the back.”

Beachcombing in Baja turns up the unexpected as the author, shown in 2005, ponders the dark past of an ominous-looking ski mask. Photo by Milton Wong.

“I could have done with a supermarket trolley,” Mackintosh quips—for the preserved junk food was abundant. He added to his baggage cans of soda, milk and chocolate syrup. He found lifeboat rations. He found “biscuits from Spain.”

Almost anyone who has backpacked someplace hot and dry, where water must be carried in bottles and only lightweight foods can be packed for sustenance, has dreamed of finding a lost bottle of whiskey beside the trail—and some of Mackintosh’s finds were, quite literally, the stuff of daydreams. He swiped up cans of beer, a bottle of Bacardi, another of Martini, and some “very old, very excellent Japanese whiskey.” Over several days exploring, he found more and more liquor, including Scotch, brandy and London gin. He felt compelled to squirrel these all away in his backpack (who wouldn’t?) and even began to wish for an end to the ludicrously lucky bounty. He found a sizeable flask, too, in which—after conducting a proper tasting—he blended all the booze to optimize his backpack ballast.

He left the empty bottles for posterity.

Onward, the treasures kept coming. Of all the spellbinding things from children’s adventure tales, messages in bottles come to rest at this lonely outpost of the planet. Some that Mackintosh found had been written almost a decade before. One was from a curious Chicagoan named Jeff Friedlieb asking for a postcard. Another came from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from a scientist studying the track of the ocean’s currents. Mackintosh would later reply to the senders.

Twenty-eight years later, Malarrimo Beach is just as far from the world as it was—but is it the same paradise of trash that Mackintosh drifted over? Doubtless it’s a very renewable resource, given the littering habits and material ways of people. But just how renewable is it? What is the rate of deposition at Malarrimo, and how long does a washed up valuable remain here? These are dynamics that have likely changed with the global population growth, the ever-thickening maritime traffic, and the onset of the plastic age, which has surely added colorful clutter to this filthiest yet most splendid of beaches. And shifting sands have quietly buried some items forever.

A 2004 account from a writer named Vince Landis in the Baja Insider.com gives some idea of the post-Mackintosh scene at Malarrimo. Sadly, Landis describes a rather fruitless outing to Malarrimo.

“I only collected a small foam fishing float and a wheel from a Tonka Truck. Was it a flop? Souvenir wise, yes.” And that was almost eight years ago.

But prospective beachcombers are already talking about 2014—the year, experts seem to agree, that a wealth of debris from last March’s tragedy in Japan will probably arrive at the West Coast of North America.

Catch you then at Malarrimo.

Water in the Black Sea’s northern reaches gets as cold as seawater can get—31 degrees Fahrenheit—and as warm as the 80s in summer. Courtesy of Flickr user Charles Fred.

At the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I went to college, there is a small, murky lagoon connected by a small channel to the Pacific Ocean. A resident biologist in the marine lab where I worked once told me that it takes 11 days for every last bit of water in the Campus Lagoon to cycle through the system.

In the Black Sea, the same process may take 2500 years, give or take. And so we can assume that molecules last borne by Caspian tigers, Mark Twain, Suleiman the Magnificent and Alexander the Great are still waiting for their day to exit the Black Sea, parade past Istanbul and enter the Marmara (and maybe someday the Campus Lagoon). Not that the Bosporus Strait isn’t doing its best to exchange new water for the old. Its currents move at four miles per hour and amount to a flow rate of 22,000 cubic meters per second. If the Bosporus were a river, it would be the sixth largest on Earth.

Water in the Black Sea’s northern reaches gets as cold as seawater can get—31 degrees Fahrenheit—and as warm as the 80s in summer. Its salinity is about half that of the world’s oceans, running 17 to 18 parts per thousand, due to the large influx of river water. The Sea of Azov, the Ukrainian inlet on the northern coast of the Black, runs about 11 parts per thousand.

All fascinating, but I could tolerate the Black Sea coast for only three days. Throngs of visitors come clamoring for the place and spill onto the beach and pose exuberantly under umbrellas and wrestle with colorful inflatable toys in the brown waves. I was uninspired by the traffic, the wind, the waterfront cafés and their junky dance music and the long weary miles of sand.

So at Alapli, I move inland on the road for Duzce, the next large town. I sleep in a hazelnut grove six miles uphill and resume biking at dawn. Fifteen miles later, in Yigilca, I ask several men at a village café if there is a small mountain road that cuts directly south to the city of Bolu, bypassing Duzce. (My terrible map shows only main highways.) At first the men advise me to take the main road. “It is the best way,” one tells me smartly. But actually it’s the worst way, and I manage to make it clear that I want to follow a peaceful forest route with no traffic, over the Bolu mountains. At last, the men concede that such a road exists and they describe the turnoff seven kilometers further. I find it without a hitch, and the asphalt becomes gravel. It’s all uphill, and that familiar feeling of exhilaration with altitude returns. Dry scrub becomes chestnut trees which eventually become pines. It’s cool and moist here, and shaggy mane mushrooms sprout from the moss. I catch a whiff of something rancid on the breeze and around the bend find a frothing, festering corpse of a wild pig weighing at least 200 pounds, sprawled and swollen in the road. I suspect it’s been shot and left to waste, as many people here tote guns but don’t eat pork.

Evening comes. I must be 20 miles from Bolu and I’ve brought nothing to eat. Over the pass, the Koroglu Mountains are purple beneath the red sky. Pine groves alternate with open green meadows, and there’s not a soul around. I would love to unwind up here with some cheese, figs, and a beer in my sleeping bag, but I have no food. Every mile that I descend hurts as the country passes, and my pursuit of a grocery market draws me all the way, sadly, to the valley floor, across the freeway, into the big and busy Bolu. It’s dark when I arrive, and I get a hotel room for a record low price of 10 lira.

It’s a roach pad here, with a moldy sink and no shower in the building. I crash on a lumpy mattress as a man somewhere in the labyrinth of halls coughs violently for an hour. I study my map and set my sights on the mountainous wilderness to the south, and the whole of interior Turkey awaits.