Image by Katsuyoshi Tanaka

Everyone has things they would like to accomplish before they die, whether they be to climb Mount Everest, buy a beach house, or meet the president. My bucket list is a list of places I would like to fish before I am too old to do so. Now, for a location to make this list was no mean feat. It has to have fish that are both large and beautiful, and be located in a breathtaking landscape.

One such location is the Patagonia region of Chili. It has beautiful landscapes and some of the best trout fisheries in the world. There are several species of trout that one can catch there, but the one on my bucket list is the wild Rainbow trout. To say the only reason I want to travel there is to go fishing would be a lie, it would be more for the hiking and amazing landscape, but of course it being a world class trout fishery doesn’t hurt either.

The next location on my bucket list is New Zealand. It is very similar to the Patagonia region in the types of fish that you catch but, as I looked at pictures and read articles on the fishing there, I couldn’t decide which looked better, so I just put both on my bucket list.  The fishing here requires stealth and precision casting, very similar to the way I described catching native Brooke trout in a previous blog. The only difference here is that instead of five inch Brookies, I would be targeting 15 pound Brown trout. It is not uncommon for anglers to have to hike with their guides for several miles before seeing a monster lurking in the crystal clear stream ahead of them, and just seeing them is the easy part. One must cast perfectly so as not to spook these suspicious creatures. During a good day of sight fishing Rainbows in New Zealand, as I want to do, an angler can expect to catch maybe nine fish, if they are lucky. That is part of the reason I want to go there, the challenge, the hiking, and the landscape.

The next place on my list is Alaska. This is home to some of the best salmon fisheries in the world. It also fulfills the landscape requirement and the fishing is no contest. Ideally, I would like to go for two weeks so I can get several types of fishing in while I am there because there are so many species that are just amazing to look at. The Arctic Grayling is an under rated species simply because it looks pretty cool and is actually rather plentiful. I would also target the Steel Head, basically a Rainbow trout that has lived in salt water and is now much larger and aggressive, they are also beautiful. There are two more fish I would like to catch on my trip to Alaska, the Arctic Char and of course, no trip to Alaska would be complete without catching the king of all salmon, the King Salmon. Now I realize this trip seems a little ambitious, but I think that it is very possible, and that’s why it is a bucket list trip.

The final location on my bucket list is the one I want to go on the most. It would be my trip of a lifetime and something that even if it proves impossible for me to go on the trips I have listed, nothing will stop me from chasing some of the biggest wild Rainbow trout in the world on the Kamchatka Peninsula . It is located in one of the most wild and uncivilized corners of Siberia, the train in this region is so rough that helicopters are often needed to get to the fishing grounds. Most of this area is  uninhabited and some of the water ways have never been fished before. Most of the trout here have never seen a person and the fishing is amazing. It is not uncommon for anglers to land 30+, 25 inch Rainbows in one day. The most common method used is a mouse imitation on a fly rod. The fish are aggressive and plentiful. Something about this place just speaks to me about fishing in an area that no-one has fished before.

Image by Tim Romano

The fishing isn’t the only reason I want to travel to the Kamchatka Peninsula. It is also the landscape. It contains 160 volcanos and over 100,000 streams and rivers full of fish. The camps one stays in are rough but that would be part of the fun. Many of the cabins have claw marks on them from bears and seeing these giant beasts is not an uncommon sight. Overall, if I could only go to one place on this list, this would be it.