Truttablog

A few lines on a cloudy winter morning

A cloudy winter dawn The first light of day brings honking geese Hinting at what lies beyond the drawn curtains, and out across the drab patchwork landscape: Low slung cloud, and dampened dust, Odours of dead wet kikuyu grass, and a wafting hint of silage, hanging in the still morning air. And farmyard sounds that carry in the silence Pervading morning memories of childhood on the farm. Nostalgia nestled in the moment, Like my sleepy being in this warm bed. Commentary/explanation

14 August 2013

Knotted legs

In a previous posting I showed a fly pattern that uses knotted pheasant tail legs, and I promised a posting to help readers tie these. Tying knots in short pieces of feather fibre is difficult, so don’t beat yourself up if you end up with bits of knotless feather on the floor, and a foul temper. That would be entirely normal, and part of the process. In fact, if I haven’t tied these in a while, I forget all my own learning and do the same for a good 20 minutes before the synapses fire, and I remember this method:

9 August 2013

Measure once, Cut Twice

Back in 1996 I was cornered by a horde of tackle dealers, who politely informed me that the rod I was using at the time was……… Well it was…………….. I needed a new one. And the ones they put in my hands that day beside a dam near Somerset East were sublime. So on my return home to KZN I visited one of them, and he very generously gave me three fly-rods to try. I tested them on a prime still-water, and settled very quickly on this one:

28 July 2013

Tying a cripple: a step by step

This represents a half hatched nymph. A crippled and hopeless morsel for the Trout to take at will. The idea is to hang the fly in the surface film, with the tail end of the nymph shuck still attached and hanging in the water. The front end of the fly represents the half hatched winged insect, it’s looped body stuck in the top of the shuck, and its legs trailing beneath its thorax and partially opened wings. The materials you will need:

21 July 2013

Tying the woolly bugger

19 July 2013

Strip-show

In his excellent book, “Frogcall”, Greg French uses this as a name for the chapter on stripping Trout. Here is a photo essay, a “visual trifle”, of the process, as undertaken by my friends and I each winter:

13 July 2013

Keepers

My friend Roy sent this to me the other day: “I grew up with parents who kept everything & used them time & time again! A mother, God love her, who washed aluminium foil after she cooked in it, then reused it. She was the original recycle queen before they had a name for it. A father who was happier getting old shoes fixed than buying new ones. Their marriage was good, their dreams focused. Their best friends lived barely a wave away. I can see them now, Dad in trousers, tee shirt and a hat and Mom in

9 July 2013

Golden threads

A little photographic trick: Look for opportunities where the fly-caster has a dark background behind him, or at least a patch of dark, across which his fly line will pass when he casts. You might have to ask him to step forward out of the shadows just a little in order to get the sunlight to catch his arcing line. Then take pictures on continuous shooting , in order to get the line at the perfect spot. These opportunities will present themselves more in the early morning or late afternoon, and more so in steep river canyons, where shaded vertical

3 July 2013

Furled leaders

Just this last autumn, we were on a stretch of the Bokspruit river on a windy day, and PD was as usual ,using a furled leader. While he was catching fish, he was having one of those days, where he was battling to turn the fly over neatly at times, and he decided on a leader change, as part of a process of elimination. That is a sensible thing to do when you are having a “tangle-day”. You have tangled days too? Good: you are human like me. Anyway, he changed to a tapered mono leader. Within half an hour

25 June 2013

Showing the others a toffee

Over the years, there have been more occasions than I care to remember, where my colleagues have out-fished me a dozen to one, or where they have caught fish and I have not, or perhaps I caught all the small ones, and the other bloke landed several ‘lunkers’. Those are the days when you try to copy their retrieve. You borrow an identical fly, and then at some point they will start giving you advise, or let you take their spot. This just makes it worse, as you try desperately to bury that nagging human nature called competitiveness. I am

20 June 2013