MINOR TACTICS IN A HIGH WIND

I felt sorry for Gerrit Redpath on Saturday. He was down here from Bloemfontein fishing a Cape trout stream for only the second time in his life and our weather was in gale force mode. Chris Bladen was along taking a well earned day off from making those wonderful bronzes of his. But the truth is as we tackled up the wind felt that strong I really didn’t think the boys would be able to throw a fly line at all.

Naturally we cut back the leaders, used small weighted nymphs tied to short tippets and reminded ourselves only to cast in the brief lulls between the serious gusts.

The advantages of the wind were obvious though. The water surface was as rippled as shower glass, the trout felt safe and with the leader blowing back in the cast a little, drag was less of a problem than when the wind is blowing just as strongly, but upstream. Spotting trout, of course, was near impossible.

On the stream I found myself facing into one of the strongest winds I’d ever experienced in the Cape. If you stood up on a rock to try to spot fish it felt at times as if the wind was going to knock you off balance.

On the river Gerrit and Chris straight away cut back even more on their leaders and Gerrit trimmed off at least a half the poly yarn indicator material he had on. It was behaving like a dry fly in the wind, like a kite, carrying his fly off course. With this done, his sweet little Stephen Dugmore bamboo stick, a 7’6” 2/3 weight, behaved very well.

You needed to keep the loop tight, a difficult ask in wind because when you push a rod hard against wind you naturally tend to open the loop. There were plenty of casts when the fly line did the strangest things, but if you waited patiently for the lulls you could take fish very close in.

And Gerrit and Chris both took fish from the start and right through day. It wasn’t pretty fishing and it wasn’t comfortable, but in the end there was no way we could complain about the number of fish caught.

Sure there was a lot of line wrapping and nymphs in branches, but that’s fine when you’re catching.

And as usual this time of the year the fynbos was a treat, something that Gerrit quickly noticed.

(Gerrit Redpath, by the way, has been fly fishing for 9 years and lives in Bloemfontein. He spends a lot of time in the Rhodes region, in Clarence, at Sterkfontein Dam and on the banks of the Orange River a few kilometres below the Gariep Dam wall. )

KERN RIVER TROUT

Robin Douglas’ son Ian who lives in Los Angeles sent him a picture of a trout that he’d caught in the Kern River in California. To my eye there is little doubt that the fish in the picture is a Greenback Cutthroat, now a very rare and endangered species. He got three and took all of them on a RAB dry fly! I found a whole chapter on this species in Robert J Benkhe’s book, ‘Trout and Salmon of North America’ one of the best reference books on trout that I have.

Just as good a reference book on world trout, though, is James Prosek’s book on the subject. To see it follow this link:

http://www.netbooks.co.za/Main.asp?D={AE5D924F-32AB-4BAD-A59D-C05DB548FCFC}&PageType=Product&SKU=1584791527+++++&CategoryID=15

Tom Sutcliffe