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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

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28 October 2018

Berg winds: Someone keep count please.

Saturday was number one of five. Five. That’s the number of berg winds you have to have before you get decent spring rains.  The rains won’t come until you have had five of them.  So says my Dad. In August 2015 we didn’t have five berg winds.  Remember that drought? To qualify, a berg wind must occur after the 1st August. It must come from the North or North East or North west, but either way, it must be strong enough to bend a gum tree, such that it shows the silver underside of its leaves. And it must be

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6 August 2018

Rest days

I don’t know about you, but after a day which typically involves say 2 hrs in the car, 8 hrs on a river, and traversing say 7 to 12 kms of rough territory, I need a break.  Call me soft, but at least half of that “traversing” involves getting in and out of the stream, boulder hopping, and  scrambling, and it is normally with a pack on my back that is heavier than it need be.  To add to that, I may have fished for 8 hrs and driven for 2, but the number of hours between when I left

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18 October 2017

Mesmerised

Tiny wavelets in the sun. Wind pushing water. Ever rolling ripples. Running , extending out over the surface, on and on. Never ending, and each the same. Sunlight twinkles at the crest of those crossing a sunny line out beyond the cattails. Cattails extending to meet the wavelets, and brushing against the fabric of my waders. The water around me ice cold and gin clear, and lapping as a sideshow to the wavelets. My eyes divert from my side, back out over the water. Again. I search for the dry fly. Where was that spot. It’s all the same out

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8 August 2017

a Genre of impermanence and enjoyment

As yellows enter the hillside light and long grass, as ambers of smoke and time tint the mountain view, and the season marches to old hats and penknives sharpened out of shape, so the music changes. I got called a “redneck” this week, and rightly so. It’s all “Seasick Steve and the Level Devils”, “Trampled by Turtles”, and Ramble Tamble. The banjo rules, and when it doesn’t, its all about the sound of that big grumbling diesel motor taking me over the pass at Bottleneck. On our trip there was a roadside stipple of cosmos, and the streams were low

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13 April 2017
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