The Mooi was a little low on Wednesday. The water looked like it needed a flush, and it was not clear to me whether it has had such a spring flush of fresh water yet this season. My discussion with Magalela suggested that the Ncibidwana was flowing strongly and that any lurking stagnant water from winter’s end was presently being driven off downstream. The Mooi, more afflicted with the sometimes unpleasant oozing of humanity, had a brownness to it, with a stream of flecks and bubbles indicating the line of flow in each run and pool.
And it was cold, which is surprising for November. Seven degrees with a biting, breeze out of the east, which would swing southward by evening and cut through my summer clothing without mercy. But as Tom lit a fire and we huddled around its juvenile flames, cupping mugs of lapsang Souchon, the black cuckoo sounded from out of the mist and rain. Some things, at least, remain true to seasons.
On the drive home, feeling the tug and pull of the bends on the Lotheni road, I got to thinking. Thulani had told me the day before that the uMngeni had not yet been coloured this season, and the Poort was only murky for a single day. But that is up where he and I work near the confluence of those mountain staircase streams. Down below, the Furth has added colour to the river a number of times. But the river down there offered up some fine fish for my friend Ray, when was it…October some time. It had not been as kind to Noel and I , but at least he got a twelve inch Brown.
Today there was just a little Brown for me, and one that dropped off. And that was after running the weighted Pheasant Tail deeply through some mighty attractive runs, with all the focus I could muster to track the lime green indicator through the flecks. Nothing.
It had been the same a week or so earlier down on Reekie Lynn. Same indicator. Same weather. Brown Trout weather, I told myself on both days. PD says the Browns turn on when it brightens a little. I put quite a lot by that. He has pointed it on many an occasion when we have suddenly started encountering fish. Today never brightened. Not once. It just got colder and more miserable. Last week was different. We did get a bright patch, and I thought of PD’s edict, after I connected with the only two fish of the day. I remember the Piet My Vrou calling from the plane trees round about then. I thought everything was as it should be.
Maybe not getting Tom and his brother into any fish on the Mooi was as it should be too. The brothers were there in honour of their late father. They didn’t tell me that, but it was as obvious as green grass in summer. We opened up rod tubes and old battered Wheatley fly boxes, and dusted off reels with leaders that dated back to just after gut. Their Dad had retired to the land of Haig-Brown to pursue sea run cutthroats, and immerse himself in a flyfishing life which the arid wastes of northern Nigeria had robbed him of in his working years. Now it was the time of his two sons. Retired, and with time, and while flyfishing will never grab them as it did their father, there was something significant in pulling out the old tackle that he had thrust into their hands as younger men. Now they would use it, and talk of their Dad. Exploits. Memories. Stories of boyhood adventures. Collective corrections of facts and reminders of people and far off places. I was privileged to witness it. Tom had paused to gaze at the mountains. Gerald spoke of the gift of being able to enjoy such wide open spaces. They made me see this river, these mountains, these valleys through their appreciative eyes. The way they should be seen.
Now I felt the tug of the bends just above Dalcrue, and my mind arrived back in the present.
It was just Wednesday. The road was smooth, and I remembered that Skuruja reckoned the Bushman’s would be perfect by the week-end. Just as it should be.