You’ll find Jason Bethune where the Tongariro’s braids split below the Red Hut Pool, knee-deep in the current with that beat-up old Sage rod of his—the one with the duct-taped grip. Been that way since he was a kid skipping school to chase trout in the ’80s. Thirty years later, not much has changed, except now he’s the one running TroutBeck Lodge, and that boyish obsession has hardened into the kind of intuition you only get from watching a river age.

He’s got this thing for backcountry water—the sort of spots where your boots sink into moss so thick it feels like trespassing. Last spring, I watched him pull a six-pound brown from a nameless trickle behind Turangi using a size 16 Pheasant Tail he’d tied with rusty hen feathers. "Fish here don’t see many flies," he muttered, like it was some kind of apology to the trout. That’s Jason: equal parts predator and penitent.

Don’t let the quiet demeanor fool you. When the cicadas start buzzing on the Waikato’s banks in February, he turns into a different animal. Knows exactly which overhanging matagouri bush holds a territorial rainbow, or where the evening caddis will bring the browns up like clockwork. And yeah, you’ll catch fish—probably more than your wrist will thank you for—but that’s almost beside the point. What you’re really paying for is the way he reads water like a bedtime story, how he’ll pause mid-cast to point out a kingfisher’s nest you’d have missed, or the fact that his "secret" lunch spot (that bend below the old pumice quarry) makes even soggy sandwiches taste good.

The NZPFGA badge on his vest? That’s just confirmation of what anyone who’s fished with him already knows: the man’s got dirt under his nails and the river in his bones. From the alpine trickles of Kaimanawas to the tidal flats where the Tongariro meets the lake, he’s spent a lifetime earning those stripes—one quiet chuckle at a botched cast, one perfectly timed fly change at a time.

So when they call him the "Trout Whisperer," it’s not some marketing gimmick. It’s because he’s the sort of guide who’ll hand you his lucky fly when the fish are being stubborn, then pretend not to notice when you "forget" to give it back. Just don’t ask him about that spot near the power station. Some secrets even friends gotta earn.