
Verdurous evening glow
An abundant, lush summer, trout streams, stillwaters and the pleasures of flyfishing.

An abundant, lush summer, trout streams, stillwaters and the pleasures of flyfishing.

Appreciating a familiar landscape goes way beyond the beauty of a backdrop. Ted Leeson explains this beautifully.

Exploring the ecological and social interconnectedness up and down the uMngeni River

The merits of having a sure-fire system to predict or achieve good fly fishing.

The Morphew family, a shot down plane over Libya, and Trout in 2020
A collection of images from my stillwater winter flyfishing season

It was the 18th April 1999. Guy and I were fishing the uMngeni on Brigadoon, on what my fishing log describes as “Blacks Water”. That was the section of river above the confluence of the Furth Stream, and at some time not long past, it had been the farm of John Black, and if memory serves, Derek Fly had bought it or taken it over, and its length was now added to the beat known to us as Brigadoon. At that time all the riverside lands from the Furth confluence up to Picnic Pool were planted to maize, and the
Making my way west, away from the brutal hissing, rattling black highway, puts me in the folds of soft hills. Soft hills decked in the ochres, fawn, brown, yellow, maple orange and bare sticks of winter’s onset. The only hard lines are the escarpment, where the berg presses against the sky in a stark outline. It is an outline of a boundary against which we retreat. It reminds me of my prized dorm bed at boarding school, that fit in a corner against the walls of the basement boiler, and was warm in winter. So too, the berg is a