Truttablog

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

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”

2 February 2018

Photo of the moment (94)

25 January 2018

Coffee & quotes

Thanks to my friends Anton and Allison for this oh so posh coffee drip filter thing which they gave me for my fiftieth. Very suave! I become philosophical when I drink coffee made in it. And the quote: “Fly Fishing, or any other sport fishing, is an end in itself and not a game or competition among fishermen; The great figures in the historic tradition of angling are not those men who caught the greatest numbers of fish or the biggest fish but those who, like Ronalds and Francis and Halford and Skues and Gordon and Wulff and Schwiebert,

21 January 2018

Serendipitous connections

Back in August of 2016 I wrote this piece about a certain Capt HA Cartwright, his old fishing tackle which I happened to be keeping, and what I had discovered about the man on the internet. My fascination with the story didn’t end there, and in the winter of 2017, I read the story of Fritz Kolbe…”Betraying Hitler”. I read with intense interest the snippets in there in which the meeting between Kocherthaler and Cartwright in Berne was mentioned. I had no sooner turned the last page of that fascinating story when I received an e-mail, out of the blue,

18 January 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

13 January 2018

Photo of the moment (93)

11 January 2018

Conservation and dusty old books

Arnold Gingrich, in his book “The Joys of Trout”, said” “Today, if we hope to angle long, it’s much more important that the angler be concerned than that he be well equipped, or well versed, or well skilled. For what matters all the tackle and techniques that we can get our hands on, or all our history and theory and lore that we can cram our heads with, if the fish are no longer there that are, after all, the object of the game?” He wrote that in the mid seventies, and in the same section of his book,

9 January 2018

Photo of the moment (92)

1 January 2018

101 years later

1916 2017 The top photo is taken from the book ”Trout fishing in South Africa” issued by the South African Railways in 1916. It is of the Mooi River near the Trout Bungalow, with the Kamberg mountain and the Pimple in the background. A careful inspection suggests that the photo was manipulated. Take a look at the “Trout Bungalow” at the left. In the picture it faces the photographer. In reality it faces almost directly away from the photographer. Furthermore, the structure to the right of the building is the small garden gate that stands to this day, but

31 December 2017