10 August 2016
My Uber driver the other day, wanted to know what brought me to Cape Town. His name was Eugene. He was a clean shaven and decidedly Caucasian looking guy who mixed his level of social sophistication and intelligence with that delightful and unmistakable accent of the Cape Flats. I can’t help striking up a conversation with these guys, just as a means of listening and perhaps, if I am lucky enough, to gain one of their quotable sayings, that they come up with regularly. I told him about the fly-fishing expo I had just attended. Eugene wanted to know what
On the way into work earlier this week I passed two of those newspaper billboards on consecutive lamp posts. One read “Rain has not broken the drought”, and the next one read “Floods in KZN”. I think it was the same day that the weather forecast predicted severe hail storms in the Free State, and the following day there was a tornado in Jo-burg, and this all followed 2 days of snow in the berg. Today is a lovely sunny day. Expect severe frost tonight. So all in all it is pretty average weather. The hell not! But at least
James and I entered a coffee shop in the high street of Matatiele. We ordered cappuccinos. The willing young local made one, and the aroma was great. Just for fun, I said that it looked great, but could he do a palm tree, or a heart or such artwork in the foam. He knew how to do a hut, he said. I was impressed. I hadn’t seen it yet, but if this man could do a foamy African hut on the top of my cappuccino, it would make the road trip all the more memorable. We watched with anticipation as
TTP (2) Tips, Theories & Pointers Back in the day, nymph hooks were quite the thing: we started getting hooks that had a longer shank to accommodate the nymph patterns we were all tying, and I for one, went crazy on them. Our human aesthetics (and tunnel vision on the matter) dictated that a nice long hook fitted with the nymph shape. But nowadays it seems to have gone full circle, and for good reason I think. Take a look at these: the shank lengths are about the same (so we can tie the same nymph on them right?). But
Questions I ask myself: What if a trip to catch Golden Dorado or Milkfish is not reachable. What if GT’s and Jurassic Lake are beyond the reach of your pay-cheque? Will you dream instead of fishing? Or will you go explore that stretch of stream that has never featured on facebook? The one that looks a bit grim at the road-bridge lower down, and that would take a lot of effort to go explore. Or will you stick to the best “front-page waters” your pay-cheque and leave balance can get you to, in the hopes of getting closer to the
TTP (3) Tips, Theories & Pointers Local wisdom has it, that when using flourocarbon, in place of Mono, one should be mindful of the following knot issues: Flouro to mono knots are problematic, they slip Surgeons knots, done in Flouro, require you pass the tippet through the knot three times, not just two like you would with mono Perfection loops just don’t work with flouro. Period I did have some difficulty backing these claims/ideas up with a Google search. What I did do was to take a piece of 5X flouro, and tie a perfection loop in one end, and