BETWEEN THE STORMS – Reminiscences of a fly fishing trip

November 2009

Part 1

There was a time when I did my regular fishing trip from Cape Town to Barkly East in a day and always ended up with a heavy dose of highway fever, the sort of road trip equivalent of jet lag. You can put it down to age, but I now rate the drive to and from any fishing trip nearly as important as the fishing itself. At first I just seemed to lean a little towards taking my time, later began making a real point of it and once the countryside stopped flashing past me like the scenery in a bullet train I began to see how much I’d been missing just trying to get to Barkly, or wherever, as fast as my wheels could get me there.

The R61, a dead quiet, flagpole-straight road between Beaufort West and Aberdeen is a good example. It's probably not the kind of road you would enjoy. It passes through its own vast Karoo of seeming nothingness, but that’s deceptive. The first half is unremarkable, but the closer you get to Aberdeen the more the road takes on a sort of Camdeboo Karoo character, meaning the mountains get nearer and taller and more impressive, thorn trees and blood red aloes appear and suddenly Vervet monkeys and Pale Chanting Goshawks are everywhere.

This is also the road where a few years back I was rattling along around midday and saw what looked like a pig in the road. As I got closer I realised I was looking at an aardvark for the first time in my life. I slammed the truck to a stop leaving a little blue smoke in the air, grabbed my camera and managed to get a few slightly out of focus shots of the animal as it loped away in a clumsy gallop. When I turned to walk back I was a hundred meters from my truck, the front door was still wide open and I was parked in the middle of the road. Fortunately, as I said, the R61 is dead quiet.

A not so good shot of a fleeing aardvark

There’s a attractive farm right on the road about 30 kilometres from Aberdeen called Kariegasfontein, a tin roofed house set in a tight spread of trees, tall palms and prickly pears. Its white-washed stone buildings, sheds and pens span both sides of the highway – house and out buildings one side, sheds the other. I’ve always been drawn to the place and often I slowed here to walking pace just to soak in its deep Karoo farm atmosphere, always found myself wondering who owned it and pondering what its history might be.

Then on this trip I turned off on a whim and drove up a side road that went past the house, parked and was busy taking pictures of endlessly wide, sheep-dotted plains wrapped in typical Karoo silence, the only sound the muffled click of the camera’s shutter, when the owner suddenly appeared in his bakkie.

I think he was about to ask what the hell I was doing on his land, but instead he said, ‘Oh, you just taking a few pictures.’ I told him that I’d admired his farm for years, that I’d kept telling myself I’d drop in one day, but somehow never did, I supposed because I was on fishing trips and wanted to get to the water. He introduced himself as Philip McNaughton, then looked at me for a moment and asked if I did any fly fishing. I said I did and he said, ‘Well, small world. I just read one of your books. It’s in my study right now.’

Nice ice-breaker I thought.

I’ve got into the habit of breaking my trips to Barkly East at Mount Melsetter, Mike and Candy Ferrar’s guest farm half way between Middelburg and Steynsburg, though you might need to consult a map to get a bead on exactly where that is. It’s a typical Karoo farm with shady trees on wide lawns and a long veranda looking out over a dry riverbed and distant mountains. I usually get there in time for afternoon tea or when I’ve been really crawling the highways with plenty of stops, in time for a glass of dry white.

This part of the world is a birding paradise, so next morning I took my binoculars, strolled up the dry riverbed, found a few birds and then came across what I thought might be fossil remains. Mike confirmed they were and took me to a few more sites, carefully brushing the dirt off one to expose the stark white remains of a ribcage imbedded in rock. He said a paleontologist friend thought it was probably Lystrosaurus, the precursor to mammals on earth and around 250 million years old. Standing out there in the dry Karoo riverbed, the remnant of that ribcage made me feel pretty young at sixty plus, but at the same time it brought home our own singular insignificance in the great big scheme of things.

From Mike and Candy’s place the drive to my friends Basie and Carine Volsoo in the Barkly district was just a lazy roll through folding grassland country and then into mountains.

But there were signs of a change in the weather. Around Burgersdorp the sky was still blue and attractively laced with clouds, but by the time I stopped to fuel up in Barkly the clouds were low and slate bellied and puddles of fresh rainwater lay like shards of silver in the streets.  When I asked the petrol jockey his view on what the weather would do he just shook his head, whatever that meant, then added, “Maar, Meneer, jou bakkie lek rooiwyn.” (But Mister you truck’s leaking red wine.)

I walked around the back of the truck. Sure enough there was a wide splash of the dusty red cabernet spread across the tailgate and the cab smelled like a cheap bar. Along with my fly fishing gear I had packed a box of Shepherd’s Cottage wines in the back as a gift for my friends Donie and Juan-Marie Naude who run a fly fishing lodge called Vrederus in the remote Pitseng valley. Looking at my stained truck I suddenly remembered hitting one of the notorious speed bumps on the outskirts of Aliwal North. They’re treacherous. Even at 40 kilometres an hour I was launched into space. Everything seemed to hit the roof and crash back down again, but I never gave a thought to a wine spill.

Nevertheless the drive from Aliwal had been pleasant, with full dams along the road, aloes in glossy bloom and prickly pears sprouting pale yellow flowers. In a field I counted a dozen Blue Cranes, which was pleasing given that less than a few years back we saw few enough of them to be really concerned.

But what was to become the real nature of this trip revealed itself as I crossed the Kraai River at Moshesh’s Ford 45 kilometres out of Barkly. The river was a thundering, bank high, coffee-coloured torrent. By the time I pulled into the Vosloo’s it was raining. Basie predicted there was plenty more on the way. They’re on a farm called Birkhall on the banks of the Sterkspruit River, a place I’ve stayed at regularly enough over the last 14 years to now feel more like a member of the family than just a regular guest.

*

In this part of the world when the rivers in the lowlands are out you make for the mountains to catch fish. In the headwaters, the flow in the streams will be high and the water will likely have a tinge to it, but that’s no problem. In fact it helps conceal some of the core deceptions at the heart of fly fishing. In normal conditions these headwaters are thin, fragile, exquisitely clear places where you have to walk on eggs to catch trout, use hair fine 7X tippets and flies so small you can’t always see them on the water. But give these streams a day or two to run off and they become the easiest places you’ll ever fish.

I decided to try the Coldbrook Stream, a tributary of the main river in the district, the Sterkspruit, an hour upstream from Birkhall. Tony Kietzman joined me. He’s an amateur botanist and fly guide now living in Rhodes. At each bridge we crossed on the road up the Sterkspruit valley the flow was still crazy with fullness, but after turning off into a side valley the stream changed subtly – it was still fast flowing, sure, but easily clear enough to fish. We stopped just short of the first drift above Theuns Botha’s place where there’s an abandoned farmhouse I’ve come to know and dream of making an offer on one day, an offer that goes along the lines of we do it up – a strictly candle light and gas powered number, of course – and maintain it in exchange for a few weeks fishing each year. And the house is right on the banks of this pretty stream.

And the water here looked perfect, miles of pretty runs, a few deeper, slower pools where the water tinged to emerald, all flowing through tangles of willows under a dull grey sky. Along the riverbanks there were scattered stands of the vibrant yellow iris, Moraea huttoni.

We began drifting dainty dry flies through the runs, each drift leaving us filled with the anticipation of an imminent take, but nothing happened.

There is so much river here that we just kept moving, casting the dry fly over any likely looking spot, then going on to the next. But in an hour's fishing we never saw a fish. In fact we never even spooked one, which was surprising and also ominous. I told Tony I’d fished this same stretch only a few months back and lost count of the trout I caught by the time I got around the first bend. Eventually we changed to a small nymph, hung it a metre under a chartreuse-coloured poly-yarn strike indicator and fished with the nymph bumping along the pebbles, our eyes following the indicator, waiting for movement and when there was, lifting the rod smartly.

It wasn’t as pretty as fishing a dry fly and it wasn’t how we’d have chosen to fish on a stream like this, but at least we got a few. They were trout typical of the upland streams in this district – iridescently coloured, ice cold to the touch and as heavily spotted as if sprinkled under a peppercorn grinder.

It was pleasant enough just being there, but after a few hours on the stream a wind got up and the air turned as cold as nails so we headed out, hiking on sheep paths alongside the side of the river, then hugging a fence in the last paddock where a lone bull watched us with studied indifference. We swallowed a thermos of hot coffee, wondered why this hadn’t been another sixty-fish-on-a-dry fly day and in the end couldn’t work it out. It seemed a certain bet we’d catch a heap of fish, but then one of the first lessons you learn in fly fishing, after mastering the casting and all the other circus tricks, is that you can’t second guess trout.

The drive back was beautiful. There were huge purple clouds heavy with rain, thin patches of blue sky, splashes of sunlight on green fields, the mountains lit at times in treacle-coloured light. It was a landscape you’d say was the southern Darkensberg in one of its best guises; a rough kind of beauty that under a fast approaching storm was at the same time subtly menacing, a scene no more out of place this time of the year in these mountains than a London taxicab in Earl’s Court. We stopped the car to take a few pictures and remembering the petrol jockey’s words, I could smell the coming rain.

That evening on the Birkhall veranda Basie cooked us steaks as thick as roof rafters. He did them on the plate of a portable gas cooker. The meat was good in ways it’s hard to put your finger on, other than to say you can’t lose sight of the fact that it didn’t come from a fridge in a city supermarket.

*

The storm went through and the morning sky was a huge blue dome. I caught trout in the lake on Birkhall using imitations of a hatching midge pupa, a tiny half circle-shaped fly pattern that I purposely tie with a resinous amber abdomen and feathery white breathing gills to match the natural, a pattern small enough to easily fit onto the nail on your little finger.

The wind was fresh and swallows and martins swooped over the lake hawking insects off its surface, leaving only the tiniest splash to mark their neat precision. If a fish rose within casting range I’d put a fly alongside it, leave the fly dead still, then lift gently, wait for the bow wave as the fish swung to the fly, hang on another crucial fraction of a second, then set the hook. They were big fish and I had to remind myself even if some were big enough to have eaten the stream trout we were catching the previous day, it made no difference. I was delighted with both; meaning the size of any fish you catch is always relative.

Just before I left the lake it started raining to the north, the rain falling in slanting grey columns that immediately left a rainbow arching across the skyline. It was nearly as pretty as the year I fished this lake after an overnight fall of snow had capped the nearby mountain peaks and turned the light as clear as diamonds.