Fishing in Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is a vast, sparsely populated province in southern Patagonia, stretching from the Andean lakes on the Chilean border east across the steppe to the Atlantic coast.

The landscape is mostly open and wind-scoured — brown plains, glacial rivers running milky blue, and lakes fed by Andean ice. The fishing here is not casual or incidental.

Getting to the water takes commitment, and the fish that reward that effort are genuinely unusual. The Río Santa Cruz is the centrepiece.

It runs roughly 386 kilometres from Lago Argentino to the Atlantic, carrying glacial meltwater through the Patagonian plains in a broad, powerful flow.

What makes it remarkable is the fish: rainbow trout introduced from California's McCloud River in the early 1900s eventually went anadromous, and the river now holds the only known run of steelhead on the Atlantic coast.

Chrome-bright fish enter from late February through May, averaging around nine to ten pounds, with fish over twenty pounds landed most seasons.

The run is large, the water largely unfished, and the fishery is still relatively young in terms of angling pressure. Fishing is done from zodiacs, rotating through more than thirty named pools across four beats.

Sinking lines and large-profile flies are standard in the glacial water, and single-handed rods are not unheard of — the fish will hold in any reasonable break from the main current.

Down in the province's south, the Río Gallegos carries a different kind of fish. Sea-run brown trout ascend this river from December through March, fish that fatten on sardines in the productive coastal estuaries before working upstream.

Unlike most anadromous species, these browns move in small schools rather than one or two concentrated runs, which keeps the fishing productive across the whole season.

Fish averaging over ten pounds are typical, and specimens approaching thirty pounds are caught regularly. The river is fished fly-only with strict catch-and-release rules — a policy that has kept the population healthy and growing.

Both single and double-handed rods in eight or nine weights work well from the bank.

The Andean lakes along the western edge — Lago Argentino, Lago Viedma, Lago General Carrera, Lago O'Higgins — are enormous glacial bodies that frame the fishing geographically more than they define it.

Access to the province generally requires planning: distances are long, infrastructure is limited outside a few towns, and the Patagonian wind is a constant factor on any open water. What Santa Cruz has is specificity.

The steelhead on the Río Santa Cruz exist nowhere else on the Atlantic side of the continent. The sea-run browns of the Río Gallegos are among the largest in the world.

Neither fishery is easy to reach or cheap to fish properly, but anglers who make the trip tend not to come back talking about anything else.