flyfishing Archives

Buzz

It started with mosquitos the night before. They had bugged me half the night, buzzing around my ears frequently but at irregular intervals. I could hear them, and I guessed at their location for the purpose of aiming my ineffectively flailing open hand. The ants required the same open hand, but thankfully the blows were one hundred percent effective, crushing the little buggers milliseconds after they delivered a painful bite to the back of my neck. I had picked them up at a fence crossing. They must have been crawling on my back. There was this pole you see. A

29 April 2015

Photo of the moment (28)

15 April 2015

Cool bunnies

Easter time, or more specifically late March through all of April, is a magical time for us trout fly-fisherman here on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. We have just come out of the stifling heat of February, which is about as “un-trouty” as you can get, and those of us with European origins are feeling ever so slightly more comfortable, no matter how African we profess to be. Our rainy season is drawing to an end. We can still get rain at this time of year. In fact we can get rather a lot, but the wild unpredictability of

4 April 2015

The timelessness of a river

“..the river moves on and on ; the heart follows, willingly, always glad to be Hunter, discoverer.” Harry Middleton We describe rivers as living beings. The concept resonates and it allows for the attachment of a personality to a thread of water in Trout country. That seems appropriate. Yet rivers, if they are to be living things, are an anomaly, because they never die. Sure, in the lowlands, some factory may dump waste and the river “dies”. But even there, look at the Thames and its tributaries now compared to how they were in the industrial revolution! When man has

5 March 2015

Photo of the moment (20)

1 February 2015

Mid summer stream fishing

A celebration of our upland Trout streams on video://player.vimeo.com/video/117028709 Summer streams, Summer dreams from Andrew Fowler on Vimeo. View on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6bvftJdnjc

19 January 2015

Photo of the moment (18)

17 January 2015

Photo of the moment (13)

25 November 2014

Silly Syllogisms

I often find that a thermometer is a poor measure of temperature, in terms of our experience of the fishing day. Leaving aside the wind chill factor, which we all know well, a thermometer reading tells very little about what it feels like to be out. Just the other morning, it was 13 degrees when I got up. On a winter’s morning, that is a very high overnight temperature, and one that on the face of it, should have the global warming guys saying “You see!”. But strangely it didn’t feel that warm at all. The thing is, that as

4 August 2014