no 36

In the last week we have switched on the under-floor heating in the lounge, and I have worn a jacket of some sort most days. By my reckoning that signals the close of number 36….my 36th contiguous flyfishing season since this thing bit me all those years ago.

Sitting here in my living room , armed with a good cup of coffee and a reflective mood, I have just paged through my journal, and tried to get a sense of how it was. Tried for a capsule that sums it all up. Something that captures it in a way that lets me roll it around in my mind without missing any of the good bits.

One can add the numbers I guess: 200 hours of fishing over 45 days on ten stillwaters and eight different streams, and just under a hundred Trout. A fair season by those numbers I guess, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

130 of those 200 hours on streams, x number of Browns vs Rainbows, so many on dries, so many on nymphs. I have all this info. I could probably add up the kms travelled the diesel burnt, the coffee, beer and whisky drunk.

Meaningless, meaningless.

I think it is better summed up as follows: (in terms of the piscatorial quarry at least)

We broke the rules and started 3 days early on the very lower Bushmans, where we were shown a toffee. That is always a good way to start.  There were some trips to the Lotheni, a few months apart, but they were lean. The trips to the Mooi were not, and there were more of those this season than last. The Mooi and the Bushmans produced some big fish for me. Bigger ones for my Facebook buddies it seems, or was that camera angle? 

I was happy with mine.  The Umgeni showed me more good fish, and more toffees than ever before. It was real “Rub your snout in that” stuff! . The lower Sterkspruit and the lower Bokspruit were challenging, but the upper reaches of both offered up their bounty. The Vlooikraal was as special as it always is.

Memorable fish?

A 17 incher in the sleet with Jan in October at Reekie Lyn.

A 19 incher from Krantz pool with PD.

PD’s 18 incher from the Sterkspruit…

……sure it wasn’t my fish, but you asked about memorable fish right?  And you didn’t ask if I caught them.

My first day of an Eastern Cape trip got me a 14 inch Rainbow on a nymph fishing with Roy. My last day got me a 14 inch Brown on a dry …stalked, fooled, hooked and landed with PD as my witness. 

“Book-ends!” he remarked after he had congratulated me on that last fish, and I thought  about that over a cup of streamside coffee off the camp stove while he went fishing. 

There was a fish of some 13 inches on the Bushmans right towards the death, that was special. Several fly changes, lots of stalking and creeping about, and eventually I fooled him, alone, and without witnesses. The solitude of a good fish on an empty river with no one to ‘high-five’ you is, I think, a healthy thing.

But the fish that had my eyes swirling  in the same way that Kaa the snake was able to dazzle  Mowgli, was that Umgeni fish at ‘The Black Hole’ . Like PD’s one on the Sterk, I didn’t catch it. Unlike PD’s on the Sterk, no-one caught it. I however, photographed it. Twice. I put about 10 different fly patterns over it.  I spotted it feeding no less than four times, and I rose it three times, pricking it on two of those occasions. 

That fish had me beaten. It is also the one thing that has me looking forward to no 37.

Now that, my friends, is surely the fish of the season!

……….My next post will be the season between the fish……………which in so many ways is larger and more significant.