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An eagle’s flight over Trout country

If you were to stand on the top of Giants Castle , at the source of the Lotheni and Bushmans rivers,  (LINK) and send an eagle in a straight line, at a bearing of 115 degrees,  to the top of Inhlosane mountain, the eagle would fly off from your feet at 3100metes above sea level. It would cross the source of the Elandshoek, which peels off to the right (the tributary of the Lotheni that joins the main river opposite the camp site), then it would cross the source of the Ncibidwane flowing away to the North, and on the

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20 September 2016

The big bass problem (part 2)

I am going to make a giant assumption, that having read part 1 of this story , you are in agreement with me that bass are a problem in the Trout areas here in  KZN , and that something needs to be done about them. If you haven’t already agreed with the above, then you probably won’t be reading this anyway. The biggest issue here, is that nobody knows how bass spread. There are however some theories. I will list those here, and then alongside each theory, suggest an appropriate measure to stop the spread. Theory no 1:  Bass eggs

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9 May 2016

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

Rain and rivers

With the onset of our spring rains having occurred in some places and not in others, the weather is foremost on the mind of the river fishermen. In fact our conversations are just a little obsessive at the moment. This is why:

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1 November 2014

Hopeful romantics

I remember several years ago, taking my [then] girlfriend  to a favourite stretch of the upper Mooi in September, and finding it very low and slimy. She must have doubted my honesty, because for months I had described to her this babbling brook of ice cold crystal water, rushing over rocks. And on a hot dry September day, it was anything but that. The water was clear, but it was undeniably sluggish, and there was a furry brownness to the underwater rocks.Water limped between pools, rather than gushed, and nowhere did one see water droplets thrown into the air by

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4 September 2014