Truttablog

Beats, Beans and books

It is easy to get caught up in the whole boutique coffee thing and get a bit snooty about it. But here’s the thing: This here off-the-shelf supermarket stuff really hits the spot for me: House of Coffee Italian beans In my machine, and with the quantity of the grind set right down, the fineness of the grind at about 75%, and tamping it down ever so lightly, I get this enormous crème, which lends itself to amazing artwork on top of the flat white. But I don’t do artwork. I just know it is a smooth, intensely flavourful cup

8 January 2019

a Vote for messy

“So what I am suggesting here is a complete approach to our waters where the competitive, lip-ripping edge is left back in the fast lane of societal superficialities and the joyful spirit of camaraderie, sportsmanship, and involvement with nature are the main goals”. Jerry Kustich I get a sense that my fly-fishing is a more messy affair than it is for the guys I bump into around these parts. Take Squidlips from Smoketown for example: He drives his blue Nissan up to the Bushmans on an appointed Saturday, and a day later there are a dozen glossy pictures on social

2 January 2019

To hell with Nemo

Isn’t it funny how, when you are searching for one thing, you find another. We went in search of backpacks stolen from foreign hikers in the mountains and found other things. I had gone looking for trout, and found cold driving rain at Highmoor. From there we infiltrated the next valley, where vagabonds and miscreants, might descend from the hills and make their getaway with their loot, and we found: A trout stream. And Gaffney. OK, so we knew the Trout stream was there, but I hadn’t been there in a little while, and I wanted to show it to

31 December 2018

Hiding in caves

On the back cover of Sheridan D Anderson’s wonderful manifesto is an advert for what Frank Amato publications called the C.I.A. That is, the Central Intelligence for Anglers. Now that concept will surely appeal to my mate Graeme. Ever scanning Google Earth, he is. Looking for new Trout waters. He checks out the background in big fish pictures and uses sublime clues to work out where it was. I help him. Not much slips him by. One that did slip him by was the location of a particular water that I may have hinted existed. It didn’t. It still doesn’t.

27 December 2018

Exploring the dry side

My World is at the front. The front of the Drakensberg, that is. My pals and I wander southwards sometimes , and cross over the escarpment to the south- facing end of Lesotho, where the mountains face the cold fronts and catch some rain from time to time, but for the most part we stay just east of the escarpment and catch our Trout here. With the heat of summer approaching, and mindful of the fact that it would be too damned hot to fish anyway, it made sense to go explore the other side. That is the other side

19 December 2018

Blood on my sandwiches

I had never hooked a trout before this week-end. That is to say, I had never held a fly between my two fingers, and used it to hook a trout. There is a first time for everything. There is also a heavily wooded valley cut by a tributary of a favourite stream, which I had never entered. Here a reclusive and interesting man resides. I had never met this hermetic bloke before. What I have done before, is to go on a day’s fishing and not take my fly rod out of its tube. That happened once when PD and

28 October 2018

Books, Boarding School, and Beats

“Often enough, the best position for a trout to see and catch these active nymphs is near the river bed” …….. ”It is useless to try to tempt such a fish with an artificial nymph fished just below the surface, or to cast a dry fly over him” The words of Frank Sawyer, from the book Frank Sawyer, Man of the Riverside, compiled by Sidney Vines. Frank Sawyer was famous for, amongst other things, The Pheasant Tail Nymph, which you can watch the man himself tying in this link. Sawyer’s book “Keeper of the Stream was first published in 1952.

15 October 2018

A case for the caddis

I am keyed into these little house builders at the moment. I guess I am just seeing a lot of them around in our stillwaters. Almost without exception, they have built their houses of either weed fragments, or small pieces of grass stem. In his book “Presentation”, Gary Borger says that he “has had superb lake fishing” with caddis larva patterns, but amongst the American literature in my library there doesn’t seem to be more than a passing references to these caddis dwelling in pieces of weed fibre and grass. In “The nymph fly tyers manual” by Randall Kaufman, one

9 October 2018

Banter, books and beats

“Hey laanie” “Heey Larnie” I ignored him. “Hey Larnie” ..he tried again. And then, proceeding to the assumption that I was in fact listening he added “How menny feesh in da sea?” He had spotted the fly casting decal on the side of my vehicle, and he abandoned his task of selling fruit at the roadside to connect with me as a fellow fisherman. I shouldn’t have been so rude, but he wasn’t reading it right. Neither was PD when he replied “60 fish…..hell I can’t remember when last I caught even 10 fish!”. “Easy tiger” I replied. “It was

26 September 2018

Beats, Beans, Books…

Seasick Steve does a wonderful rendition of “Gentle on my mind” [click that if you have Spotify] that I have been listening to lately at my tying bench. But in case you thought “beats” referred to something else, I can give you some news on this river beat: That there is my movie making friend Zig, behind the lens. He and I were on the forest section of Furth Farm on the Umgeni last week, getting some pics of this lovely stream in a spot where it runs deep between rocky banks, shaded by a forest that now comprises only

9 September 2018