Following Water
At midnight on Monday, the Victorian trout season closed.
For most anglers, the date arrives with a familiar sense of finality. Rods are put away, waders are hung up to dry, and the stretches of river that have occupied our thoughts for months are suddenly left behind until spring. Another season is added to the ledger. Another opening day and another closing day pass into memory. Yet after a lifetime spent guiding on rivers, I have come to view the occasion a little differently. The river itself is not shutting down. In many ways, it is only now entering one of the most important periods of its year.
Over the coming weeks, brown trout throughout Victoria will move upstream towards the gravel beds where they will spawn. Fish that have spent the season spread throughout the system will gather in tributaries and headwaters, driven by instincts far older than any angler. The boats disappear. The foot traffic fades from the banks. The pressure of a long fishing season gradually lifts. For a few months, the river belongs almost entirely to itself again.
Perhaps because so much of modern life encourages us to believe that everything exists for our use, our enjoyment or our convenience. We photograph everything, measure everything and analyse everything. We track river levels by the hour, study weather forecasts days in advance and compare catches before we have even reached the car park. There is a tendency to view the natural world through the lens of what it can provide us. Yet every year the trout season closes and nature quietly reminds us that these rivers were never really ours in the first place. The fish continue their journey upstream. The river settles into winter. Life carries on perfectly well without our participation.
When I was younger, I struggled with that idea. Like most anglers, I always wanted one more day. One more hatch. One more opportunity. There was a time when the closing of the season felt frustrating, almost unfair. Age has a way of changing your perspective. These days I find myself appreciating the pauses almost as much as the activity. The older I become, the more I recognise that every worthwhile thing exists within a rhythm. There is a season for effort and a season for recovery. A season for activity and a season for stillness.
For guides, the end of the season brings its own peculiar transition. For much of the year my life is measured not by months but by rivers. The first Saturday in September arrives and suddenly everything begins moving again. Boats come out of storage. River levels become important. Weather forecasts become daily reading. Clients arrive from around Australia and beyond. Days fill with travel, guiding, teaching and all the variables that make fly fishing endlessly fascinating and occasionally maddening.
Then, almost overnight, it stops.
I have experienced that transition dozens of times and it still feels strange. One morning there is a drift boat to launch, a lesson to teach or a trip to prepare for. A few days later the phone becomes quieter, the calendar opens up and there is nowhere in particular you need to be. The river moves on without you. Part of the feeling is relief. Part of it is exhaustion. Yet there is always a small sense of disorientation as well. When a rhythm has governed most of your life for eight or nine months, its sudden absence leaves a noticeable space behind.
The first weeks of winter are usually spent attending to all the jobs that have patiently waited in the background. Boats need maintenance. Gear needs sorting. Thousands of photographs need organising. Emails need answering. Projects that have been pushed aside during the busy months finally receive attention. This year, however, one project sits above all the others.
After several years of work, my book is finally nearing completion.
What began as a simple idea gradually evolved into something much larger than I ever expected. Most weeks involved twenty or thirty hours of writing squeezed around guiding, travel and family commitments. Chapters were written late at night after long days on the water, during quiet afternoons between trips and in motel rooms scattered across Australia, New Zealand and the United States. There was never a dramatic moment where it suddenly felt finished. Instead, it grew slowly, one page and one season at a time.
As I worked through the final manuscript this autumn, something else began to dawn on me. Some of the earliest pieces had been written so long ago that they almost felt as though they belonged to somebody else. One chapter contains an observation about surgeon clients being accustomed to commanding operating theatres full of nurses rather than taking instruction from somebody half their age wearing sandals. I smiled when I read it again. Not because the observation was wrong, but because it inadvertently revealed when it had been written. Next month I turn fifty-four. The person who wrote those words was still in his twenties or early thirties. Reading some of those passages felt a little like opening an old photograph album and discovering details you had forgotten were there.
Throughout the editing process I kept encountering moments like that. A phrase here. An opinion there. A reference to a river that no longer fishes quite the same way. The book gradually became more than a collection of stories. It became a conversation across time between different versions of myself. Life moved on while the pages remained where they had always been, waiting to be revisited.
When I finally sat down and attempted to tally the hours, the figure surprised even me. Since last July, I estimate I have devoted somewhere between twelve hundred and twelve hundred and fifty hours to the manuscript. Spread across the calendar, that works out to roughly twenty-five hours every week for almost a year, the equivalent of about thirty full-time working weeks.
What the figure does not capture is the opportunity cost. During the first half of the fishing season, I deliberately turned down a number of guiding weeks so I could stay home and write. For the first time in thirty years, I found myself saying no to days on the river so I could spend time at a keyboard writing about them. That was not always an easy decision. Guiding is what I do. It is how the business operates and, in many respects, how I have organised much of my adult life. Yet there came a point where the book would either remain a project I talked about on drifts, or it would finally become a project I finished. Somewhere along the way, it ceased to be simply a business project and became a personal obligation.
Most of those twelve hundred hours will never be visible to a reader. They exist in deleted paragraphs, rewritten chapters, abandoned introductions and countless small decisions that nobody else will ever notice. They are hidden in late nights after long guiding days, quiet winter mornings, motel rooms, airport lounges and stolen hours between family commitments.
The illustrations are now underway, and the layout process will begin shortly. If all goes according to plan, the finished book should appear around Father’s Day. For the first time, the finish line is beginning to come into view. Reaching that point has prompted me to consider the path that led here and the surprisingly central role rivers have played in shaping it.
In a few days we will leave Australia and head for the American West. For the first time in many years, this trip is not primarily about fishing or hosting clients. It is first and foremost a family adventure. We will begin in California before travelling through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. There will be deserts and canyons, mountain ranges and national parks, small towns and long stretches of open road. My wife and children will experience much of it for the first time, and I suspect seeing familiar places through their eyes will be every bit as rewarding as visiting the places themselves.
It occurred to me that almost every major chapter of my life has been shaped in some way by rivers. Businesses were built beside them. Friendships emerged from them. Journeys began because of them. Some of our most memorable family holidays eventually found their way back to water. Even many of the people who now occupy important places in our lives first entered through a shared interest in rivers. Sometimes that feels deliberate. More often, it simply feels inevitable.
That thought has caused me to consider how much of my life has been spent following water. Not consciously at first, and certainly not according to any grand plan. Yet when I think about the major turning points in my life, waterways seem to appear with surprising regularity. The Goulburn. The Rubicon. The Delatite. The Jamieson. The Mataura. The Oreti. The Missouri. The Madison. The Yellowstone. Different countries, different landscapes and different cultures, yet somehow connected.
Most people divide their lives into decades, jobs, houses or cities. Increasingly, I find myself remembering periods of life through rivers. A flood. A drought. My first drift boat. The first season in New Zealand. The first Montana trip. Particular clients who became lifelong friends.
When I think about those periods, I rarely begin with the year itself. Instead, I begin with the water. I remember the drought years on the Goulburn. The seasons when willow grubs seemed to fall in their thousands from every tree. The first years rowing a drift boat when every day felt like an experiment. The early New Zealand seasons when we were still learning which valleys held fish and which simply held hope. Even family milestones seem attached to rivers. Places, journeys and memories gradually blur together until it becomes difficult to separate one from the other.
Years later, I still find those memories anchored to surprisingly small details. A bend where an evening hatch suddenly appeared. A gravel bar where an important conversation took place. A valley where a river turned unexpectedly from calm to whitewater. A quiet backwater where somebody finally landed a trout they had dreamed about for years. The details themselves may seem insignificant, but they become markers in time.
The longer I spend around rivers, the more similarities I notice between them. Current behaves the same way whether it is flowing beneath a willow tree in Victoria or a cottonwood in Montana. Trout still seek comfort, security and food. A seam remains a seam. An eddy remains an eddy. Good water still looks like good water. The details change, but the underlying language remains remarkably familiar.
Perhaps that familiarity explains why anglers travel. We often speak about chasing something different, but I suspect we are equally drawn by what feels recognisable. There is comfort in standing beside a river on the other side of the world and understanding what you are looking at. The same currents. The same possibilities. The same small mysteries. Geography changes. The fundamentals do not.
As I get older, I find that reassuring. The destinations change. The people change. The seasons change. Yet rivers continue flowing quietly through the background of our lives, connecting one chapter to the next. A river fished twenty years ago can suddenly return to memory because of a smell, a photograph or a familiar piece of water somewhere else. The thread is never entirely broken.
Over the coming weeks our attention will gradually shift from Australian rivers to American ones. There will be photographs, stories and, hopefully, a few observations worth sharing along the way. Beyond that, another New Zealand season waits on the horizon, followed by the familiar cycle beginning once again.
For now, though, the Goulburn is quiet. The boats are out of the water. The trout are moving upstream. Winter has arrived.
And somewhere beyond the horizon, another river is already beginning to call.
It always does.
Anthony Boliancu
Drift Boat Guide
