Deneki Outdoors owns and operates four fly fishing operations. Three of them – Alaska West, BC West and Andros South – are fixed-base lodges. At Chile West, we run a mobile program, in which we stay in several different locations and fish a bunch of different rivers during a client’s trip.
So why run a mobile program in Chilean Patagonia? Well, we’ve thought a lot about that.
Over the last 10 years, our lodge manager, Chris Price, has been working and living in Southern Chile and in this time he has discovered the incredible beauty and unlimited fishing possibilities that Chile has to offer. We want to share as much of this as possible with our anglers.
We want to take you to uncharted territory, to places where you feel like you are set back in time, where you feel like you are the only one on the river, maybe the only one to have fished the river! There is literally too much to show a person in the course of a week-long trip and it’s just impossible for an angler to experience the diversity of the region from a fixed-base lodge.
We decided a 10 day trip would be a compromise as 7 days is not enough, and not many people could do a 30 day trip. It’s basically a 10 day road trip with 8 days of fishing, and mobility is the key. M-O-B-I-L-E!
Have you ever booked a fishing trip, and just after you got to the lodge the weather ‘went south’? Weather is an unknown, unfortunately, and if you’re at a fixed based lodge, well if you’re home river’s ‘out’…you’re there for the duration. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pack up and move to a drier climate?
Southern Chile is extremely mountainous and is filled with microclimates. We have designed our program not only to show our guests a big chunk of Southern Chile, but also to react to the weather conditions and move to the rivers and lakes that are likely to be most productive at any given time. We’ve got multiple options for our fishing platforms (big catarafts, small double-end rafts, and our own two feet) that allow us to combine our guests’ interests with our knowledge of the current conditions and more often than not, we find ourselves on some mighty productive water each day.
Sure, we spend a few minutes packing our bags every couple of days, but it’s a small price to pay in order to have fun, productive fishing week after week, regardless of what Mother Nature throws at us.
Does this mean you are not mobile for your 7 day trip? Thanks
Hi Mark,
We added the 7 day program after this blog post was written, simply because we had a number of guests who asked for a shorter trip option. Our 7 day program is also mobile. On the 10-day program we fish from 4 different ‘home bases’, and on the 7 day trip we simply remove the first of those stops, and fish from 3 home bases in the same format.