This article, from the production team at Off the Grid Studios, takes you behind the scenes of Return of the Guide, the film they produced with Skwala for the 2026 F3T.
The Tension of Fly Fishing Film
Audiences usually come to see fly fishing films with two different expectations. Some just want fish—more fish, bigger fish, different fish, fish eating, fish cruising, fish jumping, fish in shallower water, fish in higher resolution, fish from different angles—their fly fishing dreams unfolding in slow motion at a massive scale.
Others crave rich, compelling narratives—interesting characters, story arc, drama, emotional range, growth, humor, history, science, new information—fly fishing as a frame for the human experience and fish as the catalyst.
As filmmakers, we’re always striving for the perfect balance. Of course we want to show you amazing fishing, but fish out of context—disembodied from the journey to catch them—aren’t that interesting. We’d rather watch a well-crafted film about kids catching four-inch bluegill in a suburban pond than a 200-pound destination tarpon highlight reel. But pint-sized panfish don’t play well on the big screen.
Jurassic Lake, A Story That’s Been Told?
Every year, we try to come up with opportunities to simultaneously capture incredible fishing and tell interesting stories. One of the locations we discussed for 2026 was Lago Strobel, aka Jurassic Lake, the giant volcanic hole in the southern Patagonian steppe that’s full of electric blue water and freakishly large rainbow trout. From a fish standpoint, J-Lake is hard to beat. At peak season, you’re almost guaranteed to catch big trout.
The problem was finding a unique story. Lago Strobel is a fascinating place, but dozens of writers and filmmakers had already been there. The fish are huge, the landscape is remote, the weather can be brutal—and you probably already know all that, because that story’s been told. What did we have to contribute?
A Desolate Road, Gringo Hitchhikers, and A Pissed-Off Girlfriend
In the interest of due diligence, we scheduled a call with Luciano (Lucho) Alba. Lucho, a former attorney turned fly fishing addict, who now owns and operates Estancia Laguna Verde. In the course of our conversation, Lucho told us how he learned about Lago Strobel and the uncanny circumstances that led to him buying the estancia and turning it into one of the first fly fishing lodges on the lake.
It all started about 25 years ago, when Lucho picked up a couple of random gringo hitchhikers in one of the most remote, dusty corners of northern Patagonia. Lucho’s motivations for stopping weren’t totally altruistic. His soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend was with him, and he pulled over, at least in part, to piss her off.
Here’s how Lucho told the story: “She said, “No, no, no, don’t stop. They will be dirty, they will be smelly, they might be dangerous.” But I saw clearly that they had fly rods on their packs, so I pulled over. And yeah, they were a little bit smelly, for sure.”
One of those hitchhikers was a guy named Erik Argotti, a fly fishing guide in Montana and Alaska, who spent his winters bumming around the southern hemisphere. Lucho and Erik hit it off, and they kept in touch. The next year, Erik returned to Patagonia and stayed at Lucho’s house. Over bottles of Argentinian red one night, Lucho and his dad told Erik their dream—to quit their jobs as lawyers and open a fly fishing lodge. They assumed Erik, who worked as a lodge guide in Alaska, could help them figure it out.
“I didn’t know anything about opening a lodge in Patagonia, or anywhere else for that matter,” said Erik. “I was just a fishing guide, but Lucho kept asking me about it, so I told him I’d keep an eye out and let him know if I found anything. Honestly, I was kind of just blowing him off.”
Fly fishing can transform strangers into friends—shared goals, martini-shaken emotions, long days, and maybe a few hazy nights act as emotional crucible. Some rando you bump into on the side of the road, thumb and rod tube pointing skyward, can redirect the flow of your life.
We bought it; now you have to guide for us
Two years later, Erik was back in Patagonia, but this time he wasn’t going to see Lucho. Erik was heading much farther south to meet up with Chris Owens, a friend of his from Montana who was part of the original Angling Expedition Group. Chris and his buddies were filming the original Trout Bum Diaries video, and they invited Erik to join them at a super-secret lake they’d heard about as the production’s still photographer. The fishery astounded him.
He sent Lucho some photos and then called him up. “I told him I’d found the place where he should open a lodge.”
“Yeah, he said it was the most amazing fishery of his life,” recalled Lucho. “I said, “Where is it?” He said, “Jurassic Lake.” I said, “Erik, there is no such lake as Jurassic Lake in Argentina.”
The European anglers who first fly fished Lago Strobel in the early 2000s code named it “Jurassic Lake” to hide this remarkable spot from the angling masses. But even back then it was difficult to keep a lake full of 10 to 30 pound rainbows a secret for very long.
Lucho showed the photos that Erik had sent to his father. Coincidentally, earlier that week, Lucho’s dad had met a man who owned an estancia on the shores of Lago Strobel and was looking to sell.
“So, that afternoon we called this guy, the owner of Estancia Laguna Verde, and said, “Hey, we would like to go to your ranch.” And so he said, “Well, you need to come fast because I may sell it in a week.”
Lucho and his father immediately hit the road and drove for 20 hours straight to see the lake for themselves.
“We caught these incredible rainbows—huge, massive fish; we couldn't believe it—and then immediately started talking with the owner about trying to buy the place. We ended up buying the Estancia and began an incredible, life-changing journey.”
Lucho’s first order of business as the new owner of Estancia Laguna Verde, was to call Erik. “I reached out to Erik and said, “Hey, remember Estancia Laguna Verde? Well, we bought it. Now you have to come guide for us.”
Mysterious Origins
After that initial call with Lucho, everyone agreed we had stumbled into a story worth telling. As we read and watched all the previous articles and films about Lago Strobel, we discovered unanswered questions. For example, how did trout end up in this lake? We kept finding two contradictory accounts. One says they were introduced in 1989 by a man named Julio Citadini (the previous owner of ELV). The other says a different estancia owner, Alberto Rodriguez, is responsible for the stocking and that it took place in 1994. Both accounts have been published as absolute fact by reputable writers. So, which is the truth?
Though we still can't say for absolutely certain, we think both stories are true. Raising livestock around Lago Strobel is a thin, marginal enterprise. Neither sheep nor cattle successfully graze on the barren landscape, so the owners of the local estancias were constantly looking for any way to make a living. In 1989, Julio Citadini released 50,000 rainbow trout fingerlings into the Barrancoso River, hoping to eventually harvest them and create an aquaculture business. A few years later, his downstream neighbor, Alberto Rodriquez, started seeing trout appear at the river mouth on his property, recognized an opportunity, and augmented the population with another stocking in 1994. Trout farming never panned out. The extreme remoteness of the location and lack of good roads made getting fresh fish to market impossible. Those fish did, however, create a recreational fishery that eventually allowed both men to sell their struggling estancias and move elsewhere.
An ecological outlier
Another interesting question we encountered is how this fishery continues to produce trophy fish. When trout are introduced into lakes where they're not native, their populations follow a predictable pattern. First, they grow very large. Then, numbers increase but average size starts to fall. After that, they exhaust their forage, and the population crashes. Eventually, they either find a balance that matches the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, or they die out. None of that has happened in Jurassic Lake. The fish continue to reach enormous average size. Why?
Lago Strobel has a unique combination of uncommon characteristics. It’s massive and produces an astounding density of scuds and other freshwater crustaceans. The lake has no native fish to prey upon or compete with the trout, so they have a huge amount of forage all to themselves. Still, in theory their population should continue to grow until they exhaust that food source . . . but it can’t.
Jurassic Lake only has one, small tributary with very limited spawning habitat. The weather is mercurial, and hard freezes often wipe out whole generations of redds and fry. That limits annual recruitment and creates a natural bottleneck—the rainbows can’t reproduce fast enough to eat all the food. The trout density in the lake is actually quite low, but the fish congregate along the shorelines, particularly near the mouth of the Barrancoso River. The result is a place that has both the attributes of a lake with very few fish in it (large average size) and a high fish density where people are fishing.
Go See Return of the Guide
Turns out, we were wrong about Jurassic Lake. There was so much to this story, we couldn’t come close to covering all of it in one film. Check out Return of the Guide at the 2026 Fly Fishing Film Tour to see both exceptional fishing footage and a fresh story about a place you might think you know.