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Berg winds: Someone keep count please.

Saturday was number one of five. Five. That’s the number of berg winds you have to have before you get decent spring rains.  The rains won’t come until you have had five of them.  So says my Dad. In August 2015 we didn’t have five berg winds.  Remember that drought? To qualify, a berg wind must occur after the 1st August. It must come from the North or North East or North west, but either way, it must be strong enough to bend a gum tree, such that it shows the silver underside of its leaves. And it must be

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6 August 2018

Rivers to dams to disappearing rivers

In the early eighties, or thereabouts, the government of South Africa was handing out subsidies to farmers to build farm dams. It was all about building infrastructure, and I guess on some level about food security in an isolated, alienated apartheid nation.  Farmers in our neck of the woods (KZN midlands) built dams. Pretty ones. Some had London planes planted next to them, or liquid ambers. There were concrete benches, and braai places built. Trout were stocked. Some irrigation happened, but I don’t think there was as much of that as the then government expected or hoped. Those Trout grew

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9 July 2018

Lady Luck

It was just really bad luck. That’s what I told my buddy, after he showed me his fancy dragon fly imitation, and I gently rolled it around in my hand to admire it. And the eyes just fell off. Just like that. He had bought it. It was an artwork. And now it was an eyeless artwork. His glare met with my shrug. What do you say?  It was just bad luck. We had bad luck that week-end too. Well, I did anyway. I landed just one small Rainbow, and that was on hallowed waters, where trophies and numbers are

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12 June 2018

The ban on Broccoli

The South African department of environmental affairs is about to see to it that broccoli ceases to find its way onto dinner plates in South Africa, by listing it as invasive and requiring a permit to do anything with it. Dammit!  I like my broccoli!  What is it with them! Broccoli is tasty. It is only grown in small areas. It doesn’t harm anyone, and millions of us like it. Hell, some people are passionate about it. They say not to worry and that we will be able to get permits. I don’t trust them.  Broccoli, it seems, are guilty

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26 February 2018

The ‘Off season’

When I was growing up in fly-fishing, as it were, our literature back then (we used to read things called books!) was interwoven with the concept of the closed season. It seems to me that the closed season has lost its edge a bit. Not only in South Africa where several streams are now open throughout the year, but also in North America and elsewhere, where outdoor apparel has advanced along with the appetites of outdoors people to a point where images of people fishing in thick snow are commonplace.  I don’t express an opinion on all this, because I

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17 February 2018

Give me that peaceful, wandering free I used to know.

  “Give me that peaceful, wandering free I used to know Give me the songs that I once sung Give me those jet-black, kick-back, lay down nights alone … I was made to chase the storm Taking the whole world on with big ole’ empty arms” Extracts from the words of  John Mayer’s “give my my badge and gun”

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2 February 2018

You are going to die

That’s what they said. They either said I would drown, or they just laughed at me. I figured I hadn’t drowned in the old tube in twenty something  years, and I don’t fish in groups big enough for the laughing to drown out the sound of my screaming reel, so I ignored them all. But then the old thing started to make tearing sounds when I picked it up by the handles, and I went and had a birthday, and BOOM!  New float tube! Its very nice. Thank you

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13 January 2018
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