Stillwater - Truttablog

A bitch called Kevin

Just as music is all about the spaces between the notes, and how you can judge the authenticity of a friend who fails to say or do something, so there is much to learn from when you don’t catch fish. Longest silence, and all that stuff. It’s therapeutic. It’s not about the fish. Bull. It sucks. I recently spent a day on the Mooi, when the wind blew so damned hard that when I got to Krantz pool, I swear the water was occasionally piling up in a great big bulge in the middle of the stream before flattening out

9 November 2016

We should really stock carp here

At the tender age of seventeen, I would have been hamstrung and home-trapped, had it not been for Plunkington. Plunkington was eighteen years old. He also, as luck would have it, had both a driver’s license, and a car that got us to fishing water with almost respectable reliability. There was a time, the memories of which are sufficiently hazy, that I struggle to place it in the continuum that was my growth into fly-fishing, in which that car transported us to Midmar. Midmar, small tents, mealie pap, and carp. Deck chairs and booze from brown paper bags completed the

29 September 2016

An eagle’s flight over Trout country

If you were to stand on the top of Giants Castle , at the source of the Lotheni and Bushmans rivers, (LINK) and send an eagle in a straight line, at a bearing of 115 degrees, to the top of Inhlosane mountain, the eagle would fly off from your feet at 3100metes above sea level. It would cross the source of the Elandshoek, which peels off to the right (the tributary of the Lotheni that joins the main river opposite the camp site), then it would cross the source of the Ncibidwane flowing away to the North, and on the

20 September 2016

Photo of the moment (62)

19 August 2016

Cigars, confessions and Uriah

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

4 August 2016

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

27 July 2016

Photo of the moment (60)

22 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

4 July 2016

Photo of the moment (58)

1 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

23 June 2016