Richard said “I don’t care. I’m coming”. He had cabin fever and no amount of rain or cold was going to deter him. I understood that.
What I didn’t understand what was going though the head of the snuffling piglet which stopped in the mist and drizzle to behold me inquisitively. It had stripes down its back, and spots at its flanks. I observed it straight back, and figured the stripes might be a bit like parr markings on a young Trout, because the older pigs didn’t have the same colouration.
Later, I asked Richard if he wouldn’t mind catching one of the smaller piglets and throwing it into the river to see what might come up and take it. This is a perfectly logical extension of my “Frogwater” concept, and therefore not unreasonable. But Richard was beyond throwing pigs in the river. He was walking on air, on account of the veritable hogs he had landed the hour prior.
I lit up the coffee stove and we had a little celebration there in the drizzle, as one does. Our hands were cold, and wrapping them around a small cup of strong coffee was as much a ritual as it was a practical means of withstanding the cold. I gazed over the drizzle dippled pool and we both shook our heads in amazement that so many fish had showed themselves in such a small piece of the river. I had started with a lost fish. It had jumped and thrown the hook just as I was preparing to net it. I ended off the streak with a small fish which smacked a damselfly imitation with gusto. In between Richard had lost a fish which I reckoned would have gone sixteen inches. It too, threw the hook, as it jumped in an arcing leap, facing straight at me, and the image of its torpedo-like form facing straight at me is etched in my memory. I can see it now as I sit here writing this!
After that we both sighed in resignation. The spot was done. Disturbed. It was a narrow straight at the tail end of “Big Pool”, strewn with logs, not as deep as the main pool, and not looking like it would provide enough cover for a fish in the low spring flows. Having served us two fish encounters, we could expect no more from it and we had moved up the pool to get down to business where the bigger fish were a prospect. Richard fished with absolute patience, standing there still in the mist and rain, and working his flies diligently, starting near his feet where I had said he might expect a fish to dart out from his own bank and intercept his lifting flies as only an uMngeni Brown can do. I had also suggested that Frog Water fish wanted calories, and that he should throw something sizeable to meet their needs. He chose to ignore that and used two tiny flies. What I couldn’t ignore was the biting cold, so I crossed the river and went to fetch another layer from the truck, and the coffee stove while I was about it.
Richard continued to work his flies, awake to the possibilities of Big Pool. Then a fish moved back where he had lost the one earlier. He retrieved his fly, gathered his line, went down there and caught it.
Imagine our surprise, when less than 20 minutes later, another fish moved in the same spot. Richard repeated the drill.
Before long he somewhat calmly announced “Andrew, I’ve got it!”.
He hadn’t got it of course, because you have only “got it” when you land these things, and he was tethered to a good fish by a piece of 6X tippet and a tiny hook. But in due course he did land it, and he reported that unlike the earlier fish, this one was not hooked by a mere skein of lip skin. This one measured an inch bigger than the first however.
This was a contributing factor in our disbelieving head shaking as we stood there later hugging our coffee and gazing over the water which had so surprised us. Two lost , three landed, all in a spot the size of your dining room table.
Later, the rain started to fall again, as it had been when we arrived, with more intensity than the intervening drizzle. But this time there was the ominous roll of thunder. Richard lost another fish in Krantz Pool, and I reeled in round about then too, partly because an otter had swum down the river into the pool I was fishing. Partly because the sky was sending signals of doom.
On the way out we cracked open beers in a celebratory mood. But to temper his satisfaction from the edge of smugness, I stayed behind the wheel, declaring “meena enza lo driving, wena enza lo gates”, and made him venture out into the rain to gingerly unhitch electric wires that lay in our path. Come to think of it, I should have sent him back down to the river to throw that piglet into the big pool. I might just do that next time I’m there.
