High altitude trout fishing

Much trout fishing literature is about how to catch big trout, and how many, and how wonderful it all is if you return your catch alive to the water. These activities I find rather boring and a little bizarre, perhaps a tad unethical. There are other trout fishing objectives that I find more of a challenge. Sometimes I select an old cane rod with a wooden centrepin reel from my collection and say, I wonder if I can catch a trout with this 90 year old Hardy rod from England. I reckon its just waiting to be taken out again for a walk along a river.

Also, one can try and catch a trout in as many countries as possible. My total is 13 countries. Even a 10 incher counts in this game. So far I have caught (and eaten) brown trout from the streams and high tarns on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, and rainbow trout from a stream near Puerto Williams on Isla Navarino on Tierra del Fuego, only 100 kms from Cape Horn.

Now what about high altitude trout fishing? It is a bit like high altitude
vineyards and wine, but trout beats wine by a 1000 meters. In South America on the Andean altiplano lies Lake Titicaca at an altitude of 3827 meters and it has plentiful rainbow trout. The Peru and Bolivian Governments started stocking the lake in the 1930's to supply food for the populace. There are fish hatcheries and trout farms at the towns around the lake. Netting of fish has produced a 22 lb trout and the lake has an unofficial world record of 45 lbs for a rainbow trout. When passing through this region I always stop a day or two at Copacabana, a pleasant lakeside town in Bolivia (not the Brazilian one), the reason being that several restaurants have up to 10 trout dishes on the menu, and chilled beer, which makes a stopover very attractive.

Another high altitude fishing spot I must visit is around Mt Kenya (5188 meters) which is located in central Kenya. It is an old strata volcano, extinct? now, but it first erupted about 3 million years ago. It lies 150 kms north of Nairobi and only 20 kms from the Equator. Early British surveyors in the 1930's liberated trout in the streams and now also they are found in some high altitude lakes. It is a National Park and is well organized for tourism, like for nature lovers, hikers, mountain climbers and fishermen. At the bushline ca 3000 meters are log cabins at Rutundu Lodge where trout can be caught in a lake. Higher up is Lake Alice at 12,500 ft or 3800 meters, or about as high up as Lake Titicaca. To get there is a 2 hour struggle hiking up hill, or a few minutes in a helicopter. It is recommended that catch and release be observed, as it is costly to keep stocking this lake with trout. That's all for now. Cheers, Allano