Delicate Tributaries

My friend Keith had been told that there were Trout in a small tributary of the Umgeni that passes under the road a few kilometers south of Everglades Hotel.

There were no Facebook posts, no Google search results, and no Whatsapp groups that could confirm this. It was a time before all these things.  There were also no newspaper articles or books on the subject. There were just a few words spoken, and that was enough.

It strikes me as a time of both innocence and inquisitiveness ,that on that information alone Keith went fishing.

Tom Sutcliffe similarly related to me a year  back how Rowan Phipson took him to a small stream from the Boston side, and Tom assures me it was not a tributary of the Elands, but that it flowed towards the Umgeni.

Scanning the map, I locate a floret of sinewy waterways, many of which pass under the Boston/Dargle road, and which I must have crossed without a thought for many years. They are simply too small, and too fragile to illicit any thought of swimming fish, let alone flyfishing.

The one stream , which rises on the farm “Glandrishok” and receives flow from smaller streams flowing off Parkside, Serenity and Hazelmere, comes down into the Umgeni near the sawmill, and was labeled as “Walter’s Creek”  (after the late Taffy Walters, I am going to assume) at that point by Hugh Huntley, Tom Sutcliffe and others who fished it down there.  There is a roughly parallel stream that collects spider webs of water off the back of Lynwood mountain, starting up on the back of John Black’s Boston farm, and Tom confirmed that there is a second stream, every bit as strong as “Walters Creek”.  Then the other day I was scanning through my treasured copy of “Fishing the Inland waters of Natal” (1936) when I spotted this map, in which a stream bears the name “Brooklands River”, and could be one of these two streams.  I say “could be” because this hand drawn map has some significant and glaring errors in the path and junctions of some of the streams depicted..:

Either way, in the unnamed and long forgotten tributary that Keith fished all those years ago, he landed a big old Brown that was skinny as a snake and had teeth on it like a tigerfish. And talking of Snakes, Tom remembers that Colin Vary fished with him on the stream that Rowan Phipson took them to, and that Colin hooked a monster that jumped onto the bank of the tiny stream.  When they took this and some other trout they had caught home and gutted them, one had a snake in its stomach!

In recent weeks, my friend Anton had occasion to go exploring up in that space behind Lynwood, and reports a very strong stream, with lots of potential.

Then there is the Furth stream which now lies uncovered from its veil of snarled wattles.  It is a strong flowing artery of the Umgeni, linked to the main stream, which holds a healthy stock of Browns. It is horribly difficult to fish now, because of all the logs, but by no means impossible, and by next year it will be looking great after the contractor has moved through, tidying it up some more.

Delicate tributaries……

One’s mind wanders to the “Lahlangubo” and the “Hlambamasoka”, and the “Ncibidwana” . What about the “Mtshezana” , and “Ushiyake”?

It remains for some adventurous souls, without the comfort of prior explorations exposed on Facebook, to go and fish these things.  Someone with faith that Trout persist in tiny trickles, move up re-flooded waterways, and achieve the impossible. I for one am encouraged by the stories of Tom and Keith, but also by the experience of witnessing streams re-populated after droughts and floods.  Streams like the Bamboeshoekspruit, that runs dry and by the next season is producing twelve inch Trout again, and Basie Vosloo’s stream above his dam.  The pleasure of uncovering unlikely Trout in delicate tributaries is the preserve of the adventurous, the curious, and the energetic. By Energetic, I mean those lacking in apathy, more than I mean someone who is physically fit.  Who will get out of their armchair?  Who will stop scanning Facebook and go exploring the delicate tributaries? 

They are there for the picking.