Patagonia Line is a family-run fly fishing outfitter founded in 2014 by Benjamin in his home town of Puerto Natales. Today the operation employs 4 guides, a lodge team of 6, and has hosted more than 1,800 anglers across the past decade.
Patagonia Line exists because Benjamin wanted to fish his home water with people who'd never been there. The operation is small on purpose: 4 guides, 22 km of private river, 8 lakes, and an 8-room lodge that the same family built and runs. Everything we do — from the truck pick-up at 7 AM to the streamside lunch to the wine at dinner — is handled by people who live here year-round.
How a kid from Puerto Natales ended up guiding clients from Denver, Lyon and Brooklyn on the rivers he grew up fishing.
Ben grew up on the Última Esperanza Sound. His father was a sheep farmer at Cerro Castillo; his mother taught school in town. By age ten he was tying his own woolly buggers from sheep wool and fishing the Río Serrano with a fibreglass rod his uncle had brought back from a season in Argentina.
He left south at 19 to guide in Junín de los Andes, six seasons on the Chimehuín, the Malleo and the Collón Curá. The lodges there taught him the craft — 60 clients a week, 14 guides, professional kitchens, immaculate logistics. He learned to cast left-handed, row a drift boat in serious wind, and fix anything that broke with a Leatherman and a roll of electrical tape.
In 2013 he came home. The plan was simple: build a tighter, smaller operation than the ones he'd worked for in Argentina — one where the same guide saw you each morning, the food came from the same kitchen each night, and nobody on the boat had been there less than five years. Patagonia Line ran its first season in November 2014 with two clients, one truck, and a borrowed cabin.
The Line Hotel opened in 2018 — eight rooms on a property his family had held since 1962, 1.5 km from the town centre, built room by room with local craftsmen using lenga and coigüe timber. It is still the only building on the operation that has his name on the deed.
Every Patagonia Line guide is Sernapesca licensed, multilingual, wilderness first-aid certified, and has worked our waters for a minimum of seven seasons. No rotating freelancers, no surprises.
Puerto Natales, Chile · 12 years guiding · ES / EN
Founder. FFI-certified casting instructor (CCI), AFFTA member. Twelve seasons guiding Patagonia — six in Argentina, six here at home. Specialty: trophy brown trout on the spring creeks and technical sight fishing. Ben guides 90 days a season; the rest of the year he ties flies, manages the lodge and scouts new water.
Coyhaique, Aysén · 9 years guiding · ES / EN
Joined the team in 2018 after five seasons on the Río Baker. Best streamer fisherman on the crew and the guy you want in the boat for sea-run brown trout in March. Speaks fluent English. Holds a CFG outdoor leadership certification and is our designated wilderness first responder.
Punta Arenas, Magallanes · 7 years guiding · ES / EN / PT
Patient with beginners, ruthless with adults who insist they already know how to cast. Sebastián runs most of our introductory full-day trips and any week with mixed-ability groups. Trained as a biologist at the Universidad de Magallanes; the resident expert on aquatic invertebrates and hatch matching.
Puerto Varas, Los Lagos · 8 years guiding · ES / EN / DE
Came south from the Petrohué in 2018 and never went back. Our lake specialist — rows the drift boat on Sarmiento and Toro, reads stillwater wind like nobody else on the team. Native German speaker, which has quietly turned us into the operator of choice for our DACH-market clients.
We hold long-term private-access agreements with three estancias that together cover 22 km (14 river miles) of unpressured water. No walk-ins, no public traffic, no rod-sharing with other operators.
Rotation rule: no beat is fished two days running. With four guides and three properties, every angler gets a fresh river each morning — and the water gets four to six days of rest between trips.
Three principles, applied identically across every program we run. They are why our trophy water is still trophy water after a decade.
Every fly that comes out of our boxes is barbless. Every trout — rainbow, brown, sea-run — goes back in the water. We use rubber nets, keep fish in the water during photographs, and time every release. A 6-pound brown landed in 90 seconds swims away in five.
Streamside lunches happen on gravel bars or on tarps, never on vegetation. Everything we pack in comes out — and a little extra if we find it. Truck tracks stay on established ranch roads. Wading paths rotate so we don't carve trails into the banks.
Pacific king and coho salmon are not native to Patagonia — they escaped from sea-farm pens in the 1990s and have established themselves in the river systems we fish. Under Sernapesca guidance we retain the salmon we catch (within bag limits) and serve them at the lodge or donate to the local food bank. Every retained salmon is one fewer competitor for native trout fry.
We donate 1% of gross revenue and roughly 200 guide hours per year to Salmón Salvaje Chileno, the Chilean NGO working on native-species recovery in Magallanes. Our guests receive a year-end summary of where their conservation contribution went.
We don't buy press. The mentions below came from writers who booked a week with us, fished alongside the guides and went home to file their copy.
"Patagonia Line · Featured Operator". Six-page feature on the sea-run brown trout fishery of the Última Esperanza Sound.
"The Patagonia Roundup". Listed among the four southern-cone operators worth crossing a continent for.
"Top 10 fly fishing destinations". Patagonia Line cited as the recommended outfitter for Torres del Paine.