40 places where a public road meets the water and the bank is public land. Across 309 named rivers there is public land beside the water along 99%; the rest of the bank is private farmland.
excellent water good fair poor not gradedOpen the full map →Map: LINZ Topo50 (LINZ Basemaps), CC BY 4.0
Good places to start
Where a public road reaches the water and you can walk a public bank, healthiest water first: insect life (the food trout live on) graded good or excellent, then the most public land beside the water within 1 km.
Hollyford River / Whakatipu Kā Tuka at the Milford Sound Highway bridge
Good waterFairly clearPublic bank
More about this spot
Road bridge · Stream · Public land beside most of the water within 1 km
Insect life good · usually fairly clear, about 2.3 m visibility · nitrate low · catchment mostly mountains
A public road reaches the water. A road bridge, checked against LINZ’s legal road records (the topographic map also shows some private roads), an unformed legal road, or a road within 60 m of a lake.
The bank near it is public. A marginal strip, conservation land, a national park or a reserve beside at least a quarter of the water within 1 km, so you have somewhere to walk and fish.
There’s water in it in summer. MfE’s modelled low flow for a typical dry summer is at least 0.5 m³/s: enough water to fish. “Stream” is up to 3 m³/s, “river” above.
Healthiest water first. Insect life (MCI, the food trout live on), typical visibility and what the catchment above is mostly, from MfE’s national water quality records for 2016–2020, graded with the government’s NPS-FM bands. Modelled for every river; measured where a monitoring site is within 500 m, and the place says so. Lakes aren’t graded. Big braided and glacier-fed rivers grade lower naturally (shifting gravel and silty snowmelt keep insect life down); low nitrate and a mountain catchment tell that apart from farming.
It’s from national records, not a visit. A stream lined with willows can look dry from the air, a bridge can be closed, and a model can be wrong for one stream. If a place isn’t what it should be, tell us.
Licence and rules. A Fish & Game licence, and the rules of the Fish & Game region you fish (seasons, limits and methods differ from water to water): Fish & Game licences and rules.
Check, Clean, Dry between every river and lake. How, from MPI.
Private bank. Where the bank is private, ask first. Find the block on the map, and we work out the postal address without showing you who owns it: you print one page, they scan the code and answer. The Outdoor Access Code on fishing.
Places to start: a public road meets the water (bridges checked against LINZ legal road records), public land is beside at least a quarter of the water within 1 km, and MfE’s modelled summer low flow is at least 0.5 m³/s (“stream” up to 3, “river” above). Rivers measured on a 100 m grid so braided rivers count once; lengths run about 10% short of official figures because the grid cuts across bends. “Public land beside the water” means a marginal strip, conservation land, a national park or a reserve within 25 m of the river (nature reserves and wildlife areas left out); a road “reaches” the water within 15 m. River names are LINZ’s 2018 pilot and not always official. Figures from 2026-10-05. Rivers and lakes: LINZ NZ River Name Lines and Polygons (Pilot) and NZ Lake Polygons (Topo 1:50k), CC BY 4.0. Roads: LINZ NZ Road Centrelines (Topo 1:50k) and Primary Parcels, CC BY 4.0. Summer low flow: MfE River flows, CC BY 3.0 NZ. Public land: LINZ Protected Areas, CC BY 4.0. Unformed legal roads: Herenga ā Nuku Aotearoa, CC BY 3.0 NZ.
