Australian YouTuber Andy's Fishing has returned to the platform after a long absence with an 11-day solo hiking and fly-fishing mission across the top of New Zealand's South Island, covering 217 kilometres of the Te Araroa trail before finally landing a single 46-centimetre brown trout at the very end of the walk.
The video, uploaded this week, documents a trip that started on 24 February 2026 from the town of Picton and tracked south through the Pelorus River valley and over the Richmond Alps. Andy is carrying a 20-kilogram pack, a fly rod and a tent, with enough food to last the route if the fishing fails. "On this trip, I do have plenty of food, but if I don't catch fish, I'm going to lose some weight," he tells viewers early in the episode.
Much of the journey is spent without a hooked fish. The walker describes the bush, the birdlife and the heat, and at one point stops to pan-fry live cicadas he finds struggling on the ground. "You can definitely taste his protein there. A little bit like I want to say a little like prawns, but not quite. Maybe bacon. Somewhere between prawn and bacon. These are delicious," he says, before admitting: "I'd definitely eat them again."
The cost of the trip is also not hidden from the audience. "I've probably spent — well, I have spent — over 4,000 on this trip already without return flights and food along most of the way," he says, explaining that he chose to start walking out of the town itself rather than take transport to a trailhead. "It's the challenge of it to walk out of a town into the bush and do your own thing."
For most of the route the target species — brown trout — refuses to appear. Andy's Fishing tries multiple rivers, many of which he calls "not my style of river," and the tally of missed fish begins to weigh on him. With the walk almost over and a town bus pickup imminent, he makes one last cast on a slow, wide river he had nearly written off. "I can't bear not catching a fish, but it's looking like we're not going to catch a fish this trip. That would be shocking," he says into camera, moments before hooking up.
The fish that takes his fly is, he tells viewers, the biggest brown trout he has caught in years. "Wow. Wow. Wow. That is the biggest brown trout I've caught for a long time," he says on landing it, estimating the fish at roughly 46 centimetres and around a kilo and a half. "It's been 200 and I think 17 kilometres to catch this fish. That is nuts." The trout is released.
The lure is almost incidental to the story. "Totally not the sort of fly you'd expect to catch," Andy says as he holds up the pattern — a grasshopper stimulator — and points out that he had almost skipped the river altogether.
The episode ends with a direct challenge to other walking-and-fishing YouTubers. "I challenge other YouTubers who do lots of walking and fishing — have you caught a fish that's been harder won than that?" he asks, name-checking B Miles and Scott's Gone Walkabout.
For a genre usually measured in fish per hour, 217 kilometres for one brown trout is an unusually honest piece of adventure fishing content — and a reminder that New Zealand's back-country rivers rarely give up their fish on demand.