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Over-served

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

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27 July 2016

The reachable, the authentic and the appealing.

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

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4 July 2016

Flouro knots …..and fables?

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

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23 June 2016

TTP (1)

Tips, Theories and pointers My friend Wayne Stegen made a valid observation the other day. He was advocating the use of an anchor when float tubing, especially when imitating naturals.  As he put it, when you are dragging around a large woolly bugger due to un-noticed drift, it doesn’t really matter. But when you are trying to inch along a tiny damsel, or dead drift a snail, and your retrieve is being accelerated without your knowledge by your drifting tube, you are not applying the formula you thought you were. Do you know whether you are drifting or not?  I

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14 June 2016

The big bass problem (part 2)

I am going to make a giant assumption, that having read part 1 of this story , you are in agreement with me that bass are a problem in the Trout areas here in  KZN , and that something needs to be done about them. If you haven’t already agreed with the above, then you probably won’t be reading this anyway. The biggest issue here, is that nobody knows how bass spread. There are however some theories. I will list those here, and then alongside each theory, suggest an appropriate measure to stop the spread. Theory no 1:  Bass eggs

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9 May 2016

The Big Bass problem (part 1)

  Because Trout and bass are being labeled as “alien invasive” by authorities in South Africa, they are together on the same side of the battle lines. That is perhaps the reason that little is being said by Trout fishermen about the bass problem. But a more likely reason is apathy, or some other failure on the part of us fly-fishermen to galvanise into action. I say that, because the unwanted, unchecked spread of bass in the uplands of KZN has been going on for thirty years. Those, by the way,  are 30 years in which Trout have not “invaded”

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6 May 2016