He was the son of the educator Adrián Dufflocq Galdames, whose Silabario Hispanoamericano taught generations of Latin American children to read, and he inherited his father's love of learning. It was also his father who first took him fishing, at the age of eight.

 

For more than six decades, fly fishing in Chile was closely tied to his name. He started guiding in 1958, while still living in Santiago, taking visitors out for a day of fishing near the city at a time when no one else offered it. "I realized then that this was an 'unfilled niche,'" he told Patagon Journal. In 1962, while guiding anglers in the south, he founded Cumilahue Lodge near the Calcurrupe River. It was one of the first fly fishing lodges in the country and hosted anglers from around the world for decades.

 

He fished with Jack Hemingway, Ernie Schwiebert, Ed Zern, Mark Sosin and Orvis's Leigh Perkins, and called them all friends. He never forgot the older, more experienced anglers who had welcomed him as a young man "with a generosity that I remember as if it were yesterday." They gave him his first fly fishing books, in English, and he learned the language by reading them. He later passed on that generosity. He taught a teenage Sebastián Letelier to tie flies, and Letelier went on to become one of the world's best-known salmon fly tyers. Dufflocq also designed his own patterns, including the Cumilahue Special.

He was more than a guide. He became a volunteer inspector for Chile's fishing service at 21 and kept at it for the rest of his life. From the 1960s on, his columns and research on salmonids in Chile's inland waters informed anglers and scientists alike. In 2001 he sat on an advisory committee to Chile's undersecretary of fishing, where he helped shape the reforms that became the national recreational fishing law. Together with his wife, Patricia Williams, he championed catch-and-release fishing, convinced that the river is cared for by returning to it what it gives us. He warned about the damage fish farms do to freshwater lakes. "Quality sport fishing and tourism are not compatible with the existence of fish farming in the same waters," he once said. He also pushed for protections against the invasive algae didymo in the Ranco basin.

 

He never mellowed. In November 2024, still firing off messages to fellow anglers, he took aim at a regional rule change that opened the fishing season a month earlier, as well as at proposed national fishing reforms: "Once again, a gigantic BLUNDER by people who propose 'regulations' on recreational fishing and, worst of all, win hateful and stupid changes to its management in the political arena — people who, apart from eating fish now and then, haven't the faintest idea how to care for a valuable resource." His prescription was the one he had preached for 60 years: "We must read, inform ourselves, INTERPRET, think, and respect the needs of the species and their relationship with a discipline that has centuries of existence, evolution and respect." And, as always, he urged action: "Indifference is the worst path of all."

 

He collected handmade bamboo rods, which he considered "the most precise man-made wooden items, along with some great quality violins." He also built a fishing library of more than 500 books in several languages, a true national treasure. He asked his sons to look after it and to share it with anyone who holds "values and principles similar to those we have defended throughout a lifetime." Until his final years he remained devoted to preserving his home and land near the Calcurrupe, which for decades had been Cumilahue Lodge.

Dufflocq was a longtime friend of Patagon Journal and wrote for our pages. In his article on Futangue Park in Issue 9, he described Laguna El Encanto, where he first fished in 1960, as "a pristine jewel set in the middle of a native forest-covered Andean mountain amphitheater." In our 2022 profile of him in Issue 26, he summed up the way he fished: "The fisherman competes with himself. Success is his ability to take advantage of a fishing day and transform it into a pleasant personal experience."

 

He worried about what he called "the footballization of fishing," meaning the urge to judge a day by how many fish or how big. He believed that changing that culture could take a couple of generations. Asked about his legacy, he said that just as older mentors had guided him when he started out, he hoped his own work "will be understood and taken advantage of by the generations of young people who are starting out."

 

His example lives on. His sons, Marcelo and Cristian, guide anglers throughout Patagonia and carry on the respect for the river they learned from their father.

 

He understood that fishing is, above all, a form of respect for nature. Chile has lost a visionary mentor.