Corcovado River, by Jorge Trucco

Some years ago I got a fax from Mike Fitzgerald Jr., reporting that he had heard of someone talking wonders about the fish in some stretch of the Corcovado. Mike was able to get me a phone number and I called a gentleman by the name of Sean Hosman. He was very pleasant on the phone and reported abundant hatches of stoneflies, mayflies and enormous caddis, profuse insect life and big rising fish on a daily basis. And I decided to visit the place he indicated: Estancia El Palenque.

Estancia El Palenque is located very near the town of Corcovado in an extremely picturesque low valley below a big waterfall in the lower Corcovado river where everything from landscape to bird life to fish life is dramatically different. It is not a long stretch; Estancia El Palenque holds 7 km. of the Corcovado river, however part of it is braided in 3 main channels with countless islands which increase the actual fishable water mileage by 50 to 60%. The river here is extremely rich in underwater life, the fish are big and it even gets a run of Chinook salmon from the Pacific in Chile that ends its spawning journey right in Estancia El Palenque since they won't go up the waterfall.

Jeff Wells, owner of El Palenque introduced me to his friend and guide Alan Chidester. Alan had dedicated one entire season to fish that stretch of the Corcovado on his own. He had some incredible days but no witnesses. He came up with an idea that was very ingenious to say the least. He set a video camera on a fixed tripod pointing at one of the excellent pools in the river in order to film himself dry fly fishing. As it can be imagined this is a very hard thing to do since Alan could only fish and catch fish in the extremely limited boundaries of the fixed camera frame which meant as well an extremely short stretch of the river, actually a part of just one pool. Under those incredible restrictions, Alan was able to hook and land fish after fish for the camera. It was simply spectacular. Even landing fish was complicated for him if he wanted to stay inside the frame. For those of us who know about filming and the adversities Alan had to go through, to accomplish his goal, the video was highly convincing: he had caught many great fish on dries standing on the same spot filmed with a fixed camera set on automatic. That was a real achievement and a great eye-opener.

We have taken many fishermen to El Palenque since and fishing has been highly satisfactory, many rainbows and huge browns on dries and nymphs and even some reluctant Chinook salmon at times, so much so that in 2001 we took John Barrett's offer of doing a Fly Fishing The World TV show that would feature Dick Vermeil as our celebrity. Dick Vermeil had just won the Super bowl coaching the St. Louis Rams. This was Dick's first fly fishing experience and some unforgettable sequences of him playing strong jumping rainbows in the Corcovado are printed today in the video that I keep from the show that aired in January of 2000.