Downstream fishing, machine damage, bulls, and compromise

I try very hard to do things right, and to do them the right way, but we all have to compromise sometimes.

Last week I fished for a sighted Trout downstream. Peril the thought!

It was rising in Bird Pool up on Furth, but it was rising against the rock shelf that you just can’t physically get downstream of. The current plunges into the pool, and runs parallel to the shelf, straight into a steep and wooded bank. So I had to use the riffled water at my feet as my screen from the trout’s vision, kneel in the shallow water on the step above where it plunges down into the pool, and deliver my delicate dry directly downstream. Of course I threw in some slack and did it all drag free.

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And now best I confess another downstream misdemeanour. Quickly, before Anton spills the beans, because as he read the paragraph above  I swear I heard him reaching for the keyboard , or perhaps the magaphone, to say “Tell them about the fish on the Bushmans , you Philistine!”.

It was a very big pool.  VERY big. Very deep too. The water was also cold, and we were under-gunned with 3 weights. The big fish would be at the bottom, under the tongue of current coming in at the top. As far as I could see, that may have been 10 foot down, and the current was strong.  I requested a stillwater outfit, which, may I point out, Anton duly provided with complicit aplomb, and not a squeak of admonition.  We….OK, I, swung a deep sunk GRHE (a big one OK) right into that pool, and let it swing on the current. Big, nasty, deep………

 

Bushmans-14

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I don’t like digging up river banks and leaving big ugly scars that are at risk of eroding. Its wrong. But I do like to arrange serious machine power to pull felled invasive trees from the river.  Our machines ground up the river banks in places, but we removed dozens of tons of alien timber, rather than leave log-jambs. As a redemptive exercise I subjected myself (And my wife) to 2 mornings in miserable cold drizzly weather, scattering grass seeds on the bare scars.

Furth cleanup (9 of 11)

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The bull was another one were I was forced to bend the rules.  I had been guiding a group of people up the Umgeni, showing them the river clearing and what have you, and by mid morning, repeatedly promising them that they wouldn’t have to climb through a fence again.  “No more!” I told them with confidence, after I had watched several pretty ladies crawl under the barbed wire on their bellies in the dust. “From here on I PROMISE its all stiles and gates” 

“and we haven’t far to go either” I added convincingly to one whose spirit was visibly flagging”

umgeni

 

But then I come over the hill, and there is a bloody Jersey bull, standing at the gate we need to pass through. He was bellowing and pawing the ground, and his harem of cows stood meekly away from him, while he vented and snorted.  I didn’t have a white horse, but I pretended.  He had  his ladies, and I had mine, and I wasn’t going to have mine climb through a fence.  I charged at him with gusto making wild cowboy noises and waving a piece of black pipe above my head.  Whooping and whistling like a madman, at full sprint and forgetting entirely that the cameraman had attached a wireless microphone to my lapel .

The bull didn’t budge. In fact he put his head down and came straight at me defiantly.

I lost the fish in bird pool, after pricking it 3 times. I caught the sixteen incher on the Bushmans.

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The grass seed didn’t germinate on the Umgeni, but I promise to go back again when its really cold and do it again. I smacked the bull square between the eyes with my pathetic plastic pipe. Luckily it seemed to stop him, albeit only 2 foot from me.  I retreated slowly with my heart pounding but my dignity in tact (sort of), and helped everyone through the fence.

Sometimes you just have to compromise.

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