Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/769056
13 miles overland to meet up with Mark and the drift boat waiting to ferry us down the Chimehuin on our first day's float. Within minutes of launching, Robert was in full combat mode with an aerobatic 19-inch rainbow. I had a ringside seat as Mark netted the fish, and a few minutes later I brought to net an 18-inch brown trout of my own. A quarter-mile downriver, Mark eased the boat into some rocks at the head of a promising run, and Robert and I began casting into the back current on the inside of the main flow. A trout rose to my diminutive Quill Gordon, but I missed him, and as Robert looked back at me another fish took his fly under. "Fish on!" Mark called. But by the time Robert realized what was happening, the trout was gone. Robert seemed contrite as he cast back to the same spot, and when I offered him my most insincere condolences, he again glanced over in my direction. "FISH ON!!" Mark called out once more, and for the second time, Robert missed the take. "What am I going to do with you?" Mark exclaimed as I look up from the water at them both, trying to stifle my laughter. "That was a big fish!" It was at this exact moment that a trout took my own fly. "FISH ONNN!!!" they both yelled. By now Mark was coming unhinged, stuck with these two certified yokels from the northern hemisphere whose attention spans seemed to be inordinately limited. Fortunately, my fish had managed to hook herself without my active participation, a sassy 20-inch rainbow, and while I played her, Robert finally connected with a trout of his own as great peals of laughter resonated from the cliffs above. springtime sky, soaring south down the Florida peninsula and out across Cuba and the Caribbean, then high over Venezuela and Columbia, across Peru and the equator, then Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and finally into Argentina. We touched down in Buenos Aires as a heavy grey autumn morning broke across the pewter-hued undulating surface of the Rio de la Plata. Robert's friends, Sandra and Fernando, were waiting at the airport to transport us and our gear to the Hotel Melia, one of Eva Perón's former residences, in the sprawling city's culturally rich and historic Recoleta neighborhood. Two days later we departed Buenos Aires and flew west into San Martin de los Andes, where Lucas Rodriguez and Mark Lewis of Traful River Outfitters were waiting to shepherd us across the broad Patagonia landscape to Tres Rios Casa de Campo, Lucas's opulent stone lodge that sits an intimate part of the landscape less than two kilometers from the confluence of three rivers: the Alumine (A-loom-en-aye), Chimehuin (pronounced Chim-may-win), and the legendary Collón Curá (Co-jahn Coor-da). T he next morning I was up early— much earlier, I was certain, than anyone else in the lodge. But to my delight, Lucas had a warm and welcome fire already maturing in his big stone fireplace, and together we watched as the golden light of daybreak spilled down from the high mesas and into the broad, misty valley of the Collón Curá. Chef Juaquin Diaz Oliva served up a sumptuous breakfast, highlighted by fresh- baked croissants from his own wood-fired oven. Then Lucas shuttled Robert and me 146 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S I knew it had to be there. It must be. Somewhere high above, in that broad sweep of stars filling this new and unfamiliar sky, it simply had to be. We had just pulled our drift boat from the Collón Curá in the last light of my first full day of fly fishing in Patagonia. And as Robert and I stood in the darkness watching Lucas Rodriguez, Mark Lewis, and Adrian Cataldi manhandle the boat up the rocky beach and onto the waiting trailer, the thought suddenly occurred to me, . . . it has to be up there somewhere. I had never seen the Southern Cross, not even during our two-day sojourn in Buenos Aires on our way south into Patagonia. So I raised my eyes to the glimmering heavens and began searching. My gaze was immediately drawn to the two most brilliant stars I had ever beheld, and I thought they must surely be some part of what I was seeking. But gradually my focus shifted upward and to the east. And there it soared. Four stars, positioned in an elongated, slightly skewed pattern, in such a definitive motif that there could be no doubt as to their collective identity. And there, for the first time in my life, I stood gazing in awe and humility at the Southern Cross. I t had been my friend Robert McClenagan who had put this adventure, this quest, this pilgrimage together. He had been to Patagonia many times and felt it was time I experienced the place for myself. But it really wasn't a place so much as it was an identity, a spirit, an essence that would soon engrain itself deep into my soul. We had lifted off from Atlanta five evenings earlier into a clear and moonless