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Your tying space

I tidied my tying desk this evening, as I do once in a while. The maid normally remarks favourably when I do this, since she is not allowed to touch. I think the abandon with which I toss around dead birds and animals gets to her. Thing is, when the desk is tidy, I can actually lock the thing, as my brother intended when he made it for me.   I have to say though, that I was a little worried. I was worried that it would not close. This anxiety stemmed from the fact that I have been on

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11 December 2014

The Hardy anglers’ guide

When I was a child, my bedroom lead off a small study in our rather strangely designed house. That study was like a staging post between two long passages. One passage lead to the rest of the bedrooms, and the other to the lounge , dining room and kitchen. In that study was a great big desk, at which my mother sat, with her “Facit”  adding machine and did the farm accounts. She wound the handle vigorously, ran the lever across with gusto, and punched in numbers until the machine obliged with a delightful little ping, and she could write

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28 November 2014

Suck it down

It really is a terrible thing to have problems that keep you up at night. Just last week I sat down to tie up a few halo hackle, Klinkhamer style things with grizzly hackle. No I don’t have a name for them. This whole halo hackle concept is a wonderfully South African idea bank, that has been brewing for a while, with several variants around. I seldom tie a batch of flies the same as the last, and each time I fiddle with the pattern, so don’t ask me to name them. Suffice it to say they have a cute

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20 November 2014

Clarity on matters aqueous

In his book “Fly fishing outside the box”, Peter Hayes says that one needs watchable fish in order to study their behavior. That sounds like an obvious thing to say, but let’s consider it in the South African context: In the Western Cape we have generally clear streams emanating from a rocky landscape. The streambed is often pale, even whitish in colour, and although the slightly brackish water gives the streambed a yellow tinge, you still commonly have many pale areas against which trout spotting opportunities abound. In the Eastern Cape the streams are a bit more inclined to dirty

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12 November 2014

Rain and rivers

With the onset of our spring rains having occurred in some places and not in others, the weather is foremost on the mind of the river fishermen. In fact our conversations are just a little obsessive at the moment. This is why:

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1 November 2014

The honey troglodyte

  I have been tying along a particular theme recently, that being nymphs with a V-Rib body and a tungsten bead. On this one I was focusing on getting a glowing translucence in the body: Place a 2.5mm black tungsten bead on a #14 or #16 nymph hook. Tie in a rough base (for grip) of bright yellow silk (70 denier used here) Tie in a tail of natural blonde squirrel tail, and use the tag end to build up the thorax a little , so securing the bead. Tie in a small bunch of cock pheasant tail fibres as

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24 October 2014
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