Simon Burt’s personal observations about people, places, and things on and around the back road between Masterton and Waipukurau.

To be published in December 2024 by Ugly Hill Press.

One of those visitors is Masterton angler Nick Jolliffe. Nick is around my age and has been fishing for as long as he can remember. He’s been plying the Mākurī River for over forty years. A natural storyteller (he’s a career salesman) Nick entertains me over a long black and a flat white at Masterton’s Trocadero Cafe with the history of his relationship with the waterway. He’s pleased I’m writing about the river—he’s not one to keep fishing secrets—and about the area in general. ‘Good on you,’ he says. ‘Fame for Route 52 is long overdue. It’s a big lump of country unknown.’

Nick tells me that in 1981 he was twenty-five, just moved north from Christchurch, and had a sales job with BP Europa out of Palmerston North. Many Friday afternoons he’d meet up with a fellow rep at the Pongaroa pub. ‘One time I was driving through Mākurī to get there and thought I’d better have a crack at this piece of water one weekend.’ A few Saturdays later he found himself casting to a fish he’d spotted from the riverbank but was unable to see from his wading position in the water.

‘A voice from above and behind me said, ‘You’re six feet short and you need to be another three feet out.’ I followed the stranger’s instructions, struck when he told me to, and had a nice fish on the line.’ Discussing how they’d share the river, the two anglers agreed to spot for each other pool-about, working their way upstream. After a successful morning’s fishing they went their separate ways.

That night Nick’s flatmate suggested they go to see a friend of his play in the band at the Armada Bar in the infamous Fitzherbert Hotel. ‘During the band’s break the drummer wandered over to our table. Before my flatmate could introduce us, I said, ‘That’s the guy I was fishing with this morning!’ From then on Earl and I fished the Mākurī almost every opening day for nearly thirty years.* We had a huge fishing partnership over that time, on dozens of different rivers, but it was all built around fishing the Mākurī.’

Nick tells me the Mākurī River is what the British would call a chalk stream. It has a limestone bottom and is spring fed, and very rich in life—koura, insects, even shrimp. It rises in the Puketoi Range at an area called the Cascades where there are some deep channels and waterfalls. It winds down the valley for about ten kilometres until it gets to Mākurī township, where it disappears into a very steep gorge. ‘Most of the fishing is done above the gorge—you’d have to be a maniac to fish down below, it’s all slippery boulders and deep water and fast runs. Very, very hard.’

Past the gorge the river wanders down to the Tiraumea and into the Manawatū. Access on this part of the river is difficult but Nick thinks for this reason it plays an important part in keeping the fish population healthy further upstream. His theory is that because this lower section doesn’t get fished a lot, it holds a good population of large trout. He’s pretty sure that when fish numbers drop in the higher reaches these downstream dwellers simply move up to replace them. This means that despite the relatively large number of anglers on the river (‘pressure’ in angling terms) there are always plenty of good-size fish available, both browns and rainbows, averaging around five pounds in the old language.

There are also some real monsters in there, Nick says, but as I found out myself on that first visit, the chunky ones don’t get that way by being stupid. ‘On one particular corner there was always a big jack sitting in a pool. We called him George. George just treated us with contempt. We only managed to hook him twice in ten years.’ Then one spring he wasn’t there anymore.

As Nick tells it, the Mākurī is known as a ‘three trip’ stream. ‘The first time you fish it you go wow, this is wonderful, this is great, look at all those trout—and you don’t catch anything. The second time, you’ve got a plan, you know what you did wrong last time, you execute the plan perfectly, and you go home with nothing. The third time, you’ve adjusted your plan, you fish all day, and you still go home empty-handed. So you don’t go again.’

It’s a stream that requires perseverance, he says. ‘I got lucky bumping into Earl on my first trip. Earl was a natural. I’m an okay fisherman, but nowhere near in Earl’s league. Fishing with him was a delight. We had a heap of fun, and we caught fish. He was mates with the local schoolteacher, who would pour rum and Coke down our throats for breakfast if we were staying with him. A real hangman.’

Fishing friendships are special, and Nick spends the next little while in the café topping up his coffee, reminiscing, relating ‘Earl’ stories—the ones that got away, those that didn’t, the cuppa tea breaks to watch the top-dressing planes buzzing overhead, his distance-running adventures and flying escapades, the music, and eventually his illness.

‘One day we were up around Takapau, fishing the Tukipō, not having any luck. Earl was tired—he was very sick by this time—so we went to a spot he knew near Ormondville. Earl hated electric fences, so he went to find a gate while I jumped the fence. I found a fish sitting right below me in the pool. By the time Earl arrived I’d hooked the fish, so he jumped in the water and threw it out onto the bank, something he’d done for me a million times.

‘We went and sat on a log in the late afternoon sun, both of us staring into the stream, knowing without speaking that this was our last trip together. I said, there’s another one in there, Earl. He said yep, got into the water, hooked it, I got in and threw it out for him. We sat down with our fish each. And that was it.’ Nick goes quiet for a moment. ‘Sad. Y’know, I’ve been back to that spot a few times, and I’ve never seen another fish there.’

* This was Earl Pollard, who played for decades with popular Manawatū country and blues acts Legal Tender and Bullfrog Rata. He died from lymphoma in 2011.

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