Breiing about Winter
As I stood on the dam wall the other day, I got to thinking about Lawrence, who I had just met at the roadside. He was cutting out some invasive trees along a fence line. They are trees which I have long wanted gone, so I felt compelled to pull over and go and shake his hand and say “bloody well done”, which I did. Lawrence is the very first Zulu-speaking man I have met who sports a full Bredarsdorp brei (… a guttural “burr”, or a uvular “R”, as in ….Brgedargsdorgp bgrgei). He introduced himself (“Lawgrence”), but he didn’t introduce his helper: a man with one eye that looked like a dead trout egg.
Now I was standing there fishing, and contemplating whether I should take off the gloves and put on a trout egg imitation. A translucent orange one, not a white opaque one showing early signs of a galloping mildew infection. The fishing was slow. That is to say, it was just casting…the fish part of the formula was missing. While waiting for the fly to sink, I sent a text to PD, to tell him I was having no success, and that I was having difficulty turning over my “thirty eight foot leader” . It wasn’t really that long, but it felt like it. The fly landed with a plop a few minutes after everything else had straightened out, and that was giving me a sense that I wasn’t coping. The truth be told, I was coping. There was a nasty berg wind at my back, and it was helping those long casts.
The phone took a while to find signal, but eventually the message dispatched, and some time later came the reply: “Strap on four foot of 8lb Maxima, and a big Woolly Bugger”. Sound advice!
The previous time I was atop this long dam wall, throwing a big Woolly Bugger, I had had an interrupted afternoon, in which business cut into precious fishing time. Unusual business. I had to go and rescue Darling from a gaggle of snakes. At that stage I only knew her as Darling. That was the name and number The Boss had sent me as an electronic business card when I asked for the details of his foreman. I concluded of course that they are romantically involved. My inkling was supported when, having got Darling and her crew started on their task down in the kloof, and while setting up eagerly to fish Baboon dam, the second call came. It was The Boss. Darling was in distress down in the kloof. Could I send someone to go and rescue her please. Something about her being in tears, inconsolable and trapped by a team of serpents. Who could I send? It is wild baboon country, so remote and steep, no one would find her there, and besides, who else was around?
A mournful wind whistled across the veld. I cursed, and took the rod pieces apart and put them back in the cloth bag and tube. I had not even got as far as putting the real on. “There goes my fishing” I said through gritted teeth, to no one but the baboons.
It took me forever to find Darling. Notwithstanding the fact that we had cell comms, and I had a vantage point and a pair of binoculars. Second language, sobs, trees getting confused with rocks….all those usual communication impediments. By the time I had found her, chased away all the phantom winter snakes, and led her up out of the valley, I was tired, and the wind was stronger, and the sparkle had gone out of the day. It was not unlike what was before me now.
A band of still water, heavily riffled about 20 yards out where the berg wind, done with harassing the bankside grass tufts, now hit the water surface. Wind in my ears. Lips cracked. My paper-dry hands gripping the worn cork, but without expectancy. Trout away on business elsewhere.
In between there had been a very brief visit to West Hastings, where I witnessed a couple of small trout rise, and one or two lunkers porpoising seductively way out in the waves. Nothing else. There was that trip to the lake on the mountain, where I got a few fish. That was nice. Before that was a very slow day, with one giant fish, but nothing else all day long. That fish was special, if only for its size, but that was way back. “When was that?” I asked out loud in the wind. June maybe, I thought. We are on the other end of winter now, and I feel like I missed it. There was illness, a trip south (non-fishing), another bout of illness, work, and now winter is at it’s end. Where was I ?
I guess many years I feel this way about a river season, or an autumn, and that if I had to pick, “missing winter” wouldn’t be the worst fate. A friend called this morning to update me on his fishing. It turns out its been really slow everywhere.
After the hot berg wind, the evening arrived suddenly, and with accompanying stillness. My mental braying about winter evaporated as the first fish started to rise. Before long they were boiling everywhere. One or two jumped clear of the water in the sunset.
I was changing fly frantically, trying to match the invisible hatch. It was warm, and furious and infuriatingly fun, in a spitting, teeth grinding and laugh-out-loud kind of way. And it felt like spring. I stacked that lens on top of a report last week of three-pound browns spotted in the river by some farm workers. Add the paucity of fishing in weeks past, and you have yourself a bubbling casserole of youthful anticipation for 1st September.
“The coming griver seasgon is going to be gwild Dgarling”. A breiing Zulu….have you ever!
Journeys through the journal (3)
On the last Saturday of September last year, Mike and I headed out to Riverside on the upper Mooi river. This stretch of river is club water, and is on a dairy farm that sits within the “U” shape formed by the KZN parks area of Kamberg Nature reserve.
We were blessed with a pleasant sunny day, the temperature peaking at just twenty two degrees C, and the occasional light gust of wind.
One parks under some plane trees at the farm entrance and fishes upstream from there.
This is classic KZN river water for me. Quite high river banks, through which runs a stream, deep and moody in its big pools, and light and babbling over sheets of shelf-rock in other places, with just occasional rapids through a tumble of jagged rocks or rounded pebbles. You generally wade up until it gets too deep, then you clamber out and go around the head of the pool, where you slither down the bank again. In mid summer your forays out of the river involve pushing through grass and maize higher than your head, with the odd fence or bramble bush to keep you on your toes. But in September, while it has turned green, the fields are dusted in short grass, large areas are burned, and the going is really very easy.
