20 February 2014
It was mid winter in 2012. The fishing club committee had arranged a week-end on a large stillwater, for us to see if we could help the hatchery there boost it’s brood stock with some hens and cocks. On the Saturday I enjoyed taking my good friend Win out on the canoe. Win had had a rough year, health wise, and I enjoyed the opportunity to help him “break the fishing drought” so to speak. Some of us took a few minutes to find our sea legs! The boat is stable in that it will never tip over, but it
I still call this one a Stanley bustard, but they tell me it has changed its name. I wonder if it knows, that it’s is now called a Denham’s Bustard. It is a really large bird, that struts confidently in the veld. I haven’t often been able to get as close as I did this day.
The shelduck is most distinctive in that the male and female are equally striking, but different, and I always seem to see them together. They inhabit our still-waters here in KZN, and provide a welcome distraction on slow days.
To my fishing buddy on his birthday: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF2l_XP6Fkg?feature=player_detailpage]
With the water temperature in the lake varying from 21.3 degrees at 5 metres depth to 23 degrees at the surface, this was always going to be a tough day’s fishing. The sun was out in the morning, and I sat out there on the tube, lathered up with suncream, thankful for the breeze, and not entirely confident.
To reconnoitre:To Survey, make a reconnaissance of, explore, scout (out), make a survey of, make an observation of. Something I like to do from time to time, is to go and find a “new” piece of water, to give it a look over, and to “plan the attack”, so to speak. These expeditions steal precious fishing time, so they are best undertaken on those hot blustery days when, if you were out there with a fly rod, you would be sleeping under a tree anyway. Stillwaters seldom need this kind of work….they are by their very nature, easy things to
From a way off I thought this was a steppe buzzard A closer look revealed a rufus coloured underbelly. An immature Jackal Buzzard I thought at first, but of course that bird has a rufus band across the chest. As an amateur birder I really cant be sure. All I know is that those primary feathers look very familiar. I have two of them stuck in my fishing hat! Yesterday I saw a book on raptors in the bookshop, and with only a mental picture, I decided that it probably is a Steppe Buzzard. They are fairly common, but their
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have to check myself. I have to take note and avoid falling into the trap, the lazy trap, of going through the motions, and not fishing properly. Typically at day’s end, or when fishing in less than ideal conditions, ones mind starts to wander. The most classic symptoms of this are probably: starting to retrieve the fly too fast lifting off to cast earlier than you should: not fishing the cast out Moving to a new spot and failing to fish the water under your feet, but just casting “out there” not
On Saturday we were out fly-fishing in the Underberg area. We had a storm in the early afternoon. Nothing special: just some wild wind, and 10mm or so of rain, and later the front moved in with a cool wind, a rumble of thunder and some rolling mist. Back home in Hilton that night I could hear a little rain on the veranda roof. That was it. On Sunday, we took a drive under grey skies up to the Mooi River. Wow: