Before Tecka opened to fly fishers, Federico Ochoa set out to clear invasive willows from its rivers. Why it mattered then, and what you fish today.
Tecka Lodge is starting its 25th season. The work on the water started earlier than that.
When the Ochoa family decided to open Tecka to fly fishers, Federico Ochoa, Pedro’s father, did not start with the lodge. He started with the rivers, and with a tree.
Before Tecka opened to fly fishers, Federico Ochoa set out to clear invasive willows from its rivers. Why it mattered then, and what you fish today.
Tecka Lodge is starting its 25th season. The work on the water started earlier than that.
When the Ochoa family decided to open Tecka to fly fishers, Federico Ochoa, Pedro’s father, did not start with the lodge. He started with the rivers, and with a tree. [Year he started].
A tree from somewhere else
Willows are not native to most of Patagonia. European settlers brought them at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, for windbreaks, shade and firewood. Weeping willows went in next to farmhouses. Crack willows went in along ditches and fences. They did not stay there.
The crack willow turned out to be one of the most invasive trees in the region. Its branches are brittle. They snap, fall into the river and drift until they catch on a bank, where they take root. One tree becomes a line of trees, and over the years the line becomes a wall.
Researchers who study Patagonian rivers name the upper Chubut basin, where the Tecka River runs, as one of the places where willows have been a problem for a long time. In many stretches they form galleries so dense that it is hard to reach the water at all. Photographs of some of these rivers from the 1970s show almost no willows.
What it costs an angler
A willow wall means banks you cannot walk, back casts with nowhere to go and flies lost in the branches. Good water becomes water nobody fishes.
What it costs the river
The larger cost is water. Willows pull a lot of it from the banks and release it into the air through their leaves. The Tecka valley gets less than 200 mm of rain a year, and the river is the water source for everything around it.
The willows also take ground from the native tree. Sauce criollo (Salix humboldtiana) is Argentina’s only native willow, and its southernmost populations grow along the Chubut River. Invasive willows root from fallen branches more easily, grow larger as adults and resprout better after they are cut, so in many places the native tree loses.
A personal fight
Federico took it as a personal challenge. [How he started: who worked with him, which river or stretch came first, what tools they used].
Cutting a willow is the easy part. Keeping it gone is harder, because invasive willows come back from stumps and roots. So the work became a routine: [every season / every winter], back to the same banks. [Detail or memory from Pedro].
[Result: how many miles or stretches were cleared, what the banks look like today, a line from Pedro or a guide].
What you fish today
Tecka has over 96 miles of private water. When you walk a bank here and have room for a back cast, part of that comes from work Federico started before the first guest arrived. [If it applies: the work continues today with …].
Twenty-five seasons of fishing at Tecka rest on that work.