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The Umpqua Swiftwater ZS

I don’t do tackle reviews. I am just not a hugely technical tackle junkie. Stuff feels right or it doesn’t. This level of analytical skill is of no use when spewing out advice on a rod or line. But I reckon I could pull it off with a fly vest or pack, because whether it feels right is everything.  So here goes: To me a fly-fishing combo vest/pack is a critical piece of kit. For the type of fishing I do, and perhaps just because I am stuck in my ways, I am not considering a sling pack, or chest

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16 March 2017

Sir!

It was during a Rhodes trip a few years ago, that I learnt of the death of Tim Wright. Tim was an outdoorsman, an educator, and a gentleman. He was also a flyfisherman. I had the good fortune of benefitting from the fact that he taught and mentored both of my sons at junior school. Tim was one of those guys, like my old friend Win Whitear, who punished schoolboys with what modern rules might decree as “cruel and unusual punishment”….(things like making them carry a rock, for rocking on their chair, or famously once throwing all a boy’s books

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9 March 2017

Books and thievery

It was a very disappointed thief who broke down my patio door in the middle of the night with an axe, in search of a flat screen TV. All he got was an angry Great Dane and a sea of books. I only wish we had managed to give him some fast flying lead too….the bastard! But let me put the angry thoughts of retribution aside for a moment and focus on his disappointment, and my delight: Books. I hadn’t realised it, but books, and more specifically flyfishing books, have been in my blood for a long time.  I remembered

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28 February 2017

It sounds like a man cave…..

The room is small in a way that is hard to define. It is spacious until one of my big outdoorsy type fishing friends comes in, and he seems to have to squeeze past the coffee table before occupying one of the two couches like I would fill a  single seater. The coffee table always has a fly fishing magazine or two on it. Sometimes a scrap of paper with a sketch of a dry fly, or the phone number of some farmer scrawled on it. Off in the corner is a glass cabinet in which there are some outdoor

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13 February 2017

Great Things

I have had the privilege and the satisfaction over the last three years or so, to work alongside some seriously committed fly-fishing conservationists on the Umgeni River: Roy (whose doctor told him to get some youngsters to haul logs instead of suffering another hernia) Anton (who had an adverse reaction to bramble spray, but carried on anyway) Penny, who isn’t scared to get dirty Lucky and Zuma….two of the hardest working guys you will find Bob…who is just always there and quietly gets on with it Russell….who has committed diesel and machines for many, many hours and tidied up after

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8 February 2017

Fly-fishing unplugged

Please forgive me for being just a little cynical when some “fly-fishing personality” posts a picture of the hamburger he just had for lunch at the airport, and some sport comments “Amazing!”  “A monkey in silk is a monkey no less”  Rodriguez. I find myself walking a fine line between a few angling mates who entirely shun the internet, including Facebook, and others who report what they had for breakfast, and post another picture of the Adams they just tied, as though none of us have ever seen the thing. “Meaningless, meaningless”      the book of Ecclesiastes In recent months I

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24 January 2017
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