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I thought that looked familiar, Kehlamehlo

  Forgive me for sharing the exact same picture a second time, but I thought this was too good not to. See the picture taken by me recently and posted here on Truttablog (Photo of the moment no 46). Hopefully you realised that there is a trout in there Now look at the picture below. It is a picture taken by Tom Sutcliffe on a stream he frequents. Tom showed me a stream recently, and after we had fished it, I returned a few days later with my wife for a casual hike (I was under strict “no fishing” rules!)

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20 November 2015

Droughts and patience

I am sure most of us have had some uninformed person, upon hearing that we are a fly fisherman, say “Oh I wouldn’t have the patience to sit and wait for a fish to bite”. Our explanations are long and tedious, and the person glazes over after a minute or so. I advocate Ed Zern’s approach*:  Just throw stones at them until they go away! We all know that fly-fishing, and river fly-fishing in particular, is so filled with activity, stealth, assessment and other things that occupy our faculties, that one hardly requires patience.  Where we do however require patience,

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12 November 2015

Your Kavango

On Sunday it was roast beef and veg in Notties, and as the storm passed, and cool mist and drizzle set in, beers at the Notties pub amidst talk of Trout. Tuesday I was in the city: Lusaka. As I write I am looking out over the Kavango at hot sticky Angola, and with a bit of luck, I won’t miss my flight to Cape Town on Saturday.  Stop the word, I want to get off. But we can’t get off. We need to look after it instead. Here in Northern Namibia their issues are food for thought. Flying in

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30 October 2015

In the dead of night

Being one who mulls a lot (someone once labeled  me a DTN*), I have been dabbling with the concept of night fishing. Mental dabbling that is. And I am talking here of night fishing in rivers ….not stillwaters. I have done a bit of night fishing on stillwaters. A bit. Not enough. But I confess, I have never truly night fished a stream. My angling background is thick with images of people holding up fish in an inky blackness, or stories of Browns coming out in the dark, and of talk of fishing at night when it cools off. I

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23 October 2015

Tying tips: Dubbing loops

There is a lot of hype around the splitting of threads to form a dubbing loop. In my opinion, if you are using fine enough thread, you can simply create a loop in the thread, and you, or anyone else looking at your flies, will never be able to tell the difference. To create a loop, simply use your fingers to hold a loop of thread away from the shank, and return the bobbin lead thread, to the shank, wind it around the base of the loop so formed, and continue winding. You could also introduce a thread loop using

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18 October 2015

Fly-fishing and the pursuit of happiness: Where it all began

I don’t know about you, but I happen to remember the place and moment in time, when I decided that fly-fishing was my thing, and that quite frankly, from that moment on, it would be a lifelong pursuit. If that sounds a little like a religious experience, then so be it. I was standing on the path leading to the school hall. It was junior school. I had probably caught my first Trout in 1979. My second had been on a school trip to “Mc Dougall’s dam” on Strathaven in Underberg: It was now 1981.My classmate Murray and I were

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6 October 2015
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