22 December 2016
The happy season that was, the one between the arrival of the cuckoos and the arrival of the mosquitoes, is now behind us. Now we have fierce heat, fierce storms, and humidity in between. We have mosquitoes too. I live in fear. The big ones must be on their way. They bite your head off and drink you like a coke. It has been a great spring, I think. By my reckoning, it has been a cool one, (Hell, we had snow in October!) , and it has been a relatively wet one too. Having said that, I got a
The word “advocacy” is used extensively by Greg French in his recently published book ”The Last Wild Trout”. In reading the context in which he uses it, the meaning is abundantly clear, but for a simple starting point here is the definition as found on Google: ad·vo·ca·cy ….pronounced ˈadvəkəsē/ : noun public support for or recommendation of a particular cause or policy. example: "their advocacy of traditional family values" synonyms: support for, backing of, promotion of, championing of; I found that French’s book in general, and the repeated use of this word in the informative “conservation notes” at the end
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
It is a term my fishing buddies and I have adopted over the years. It refers specifically to Brown Trout, and it is an attempt to describe their behaviour when they are prevalent, on the feed, and generally visible to the observant flyfisher. Browns, as we all know, are fickle things. They have a habit of disappearing, both in stillwater and in streams. Their apparent disappearance is a very common cause of comments about inadequate stocking, or the catastrophic effects of a drought, or deep suspicions and conspiracy theories about sinister fish-kills. I too have fallen for their tricks and
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
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