BETWEEN THE STORMS - Reminiscences of a fly fishing trip Part 2

A day later I sat on the Birkhall veranda in the soft rays of an early morning sun tying trout flies. I’d given Carien's handsome chickens the eye as a source of cosmic fly tying materials, then thought better of it.  I strolled across to the shed where shearers were deftly flicking ewes onto their backs and in one long, seemingly seamless run they sheared all the wool off each animal then casually tossed the pelt onto the sorting table as if it was a solid wool duvet.

Basie asked if I’d mind collecting feed for his rams in Barkly. On the way over I took care to avoid a tortoise crossing the road, a rare sight in this part of the world, then came across another nearer town. On the road back I threaded around three more and actually got out of my truck to save one crossing the road on a blind rise. He was making for high ground, so that’s where I put him. Then it struck me that all these tortoises had been making for the high ground.

That night bright sheets of lightening lit the sky out north. There were deep rumbles from across the hills, one momentous clap of window-rattling thunder and we were in darkness. When lightening lit the valley we saw rain falling in waves blown nearly horizontal by the powerful winds, scintillating shafts of silver water that buckled the trees. Later I lay in bed reading a book by candle light, enjoying the storm’s exhibition of primeval power. I also wondered whether the tortoises knew a lot more about local weather patterns than we humans do.

*

The next day was as quiet as a dove in a tree, the sky laced with feathery clouds. Things felt innocent enough down on earth, but long vapour trails behind passing jets were blown apart in seconds, meaning high above us the wind was tearing along. Once again Tony Kietzman joined me. We fished the lake on Birkhall. I waded into a patch of weeds until I was up to my waist and cast a short line into winking water. We’d driven past a Black Stork on the way in and an African Spoonbill was feeding in the shallows on the far side of the lake. Above us a Cape Vulture swung lazy circles in an azure sky.

 

I was back on that midge pupa imitation. It was small, but then the natural insect is small and somehow it felt right. The water looked inviting in the way lake water does when it falls straight off weed banks into resinous green caverns full of clarity and depth. There was plenty of lake with plenty of fish, but my midge pattern fished static or dead slow just below the surface got no interest. At one time I left my rod lying on a bed of weeds while I searched the pockets of my vest for my fly box. That’s when I noticed a pale green damselfly wriggling through the water towards me, watched it crawl up a stalk, hatch into a flimsy, waxy-looking adult, then climb onto the handle of my fly rod to dry out.

I changed to an imitation of a slender, pale green damsel fly nymph, fished it slowly back towards the weed beds just under the surface and was straight away fast into a strong fish.

I landed half-a dozen rainbows in not many more than half-a dozen casts, one of them a brute of a fish well over six pounds.

You might say the cue to change to a damsel imitation was a blessing of sorts, and it was, but the fact is we don’t crack the code in fly fishing this easily that often and the point you need to remind yourself of is that the code is mostly not this easy to crack, which I suppose is one of the main reasons we keep fly fishing.

*

It’s a reassuring sign on any trip, and fishing trips are no exception, that things are going well when you lose track of the days, and it’s better if you aren’t exactly sure of the month. I’d had a day wandering up a small stream that gave up its trout quite easily, none of them as impressive though as the pair of prancing Crowned Cranes I came across on the drive back, or the little White-throated Swallow that refused to fly off its perch on a bridge until I was so close I could almost touch it. In the stream I'd managed to juggle a picture of a trout I shot against the sun.

I spent the afternoon on Birkhall lake again, experimenting with different patterns. Things were getting more familiar. There wasn’t much that out-fished my small damsel fly nymph during the day, the dry fly remained overlooked most of the time maybe because in the unsettled weather the fish weren’t feeding off the top, and the tiny amber-bodied midge pattern did best in the evening light, especially when I fished it in the holes around a dead willow tree up in the shallows where the riffled water meets the flat water. All of which I’d discovered over the years holds good for most stillwaters I’ve ever fished - but especially the value of tiny damselfly imitations.

 

*

Next day Carien reminded me that we were due in Rhodes to get some business done, otherwise I might just have headed back into the hills on my own again. Apparently it was Thursday, though I couldn’t quite get my mind around that.

 

We took the back road through the Bokspruit valley where the river was bank high and looked it had been over the bridge a few days before.

The Bokspruit bank high at Carabas 

Bridge over the Bokspruit

Strange how you remember a river, even in some detail, then suddenly arrive back there expecting to see what you remember and end up surprised to find it’s a different river with nothing you can recognize at all, even though you know the rains have been close to a record high.

                

The Bokspruit - same run, different times, two different rivers

On the way to Rhodes we ran into a squall that quickly turned into a minor hail storm, and although bad weather isn’t anything unusual in this area, this was a trip where I found myself thinking a lot more about global warming. In Rhodes we had coffee with Tony Kietzman in his little cottage with its red-slatted veranda.

Tony on the steps of his cottage

Tony’s working hard to put the natural floral of this whole area on the tourist map, and when he’s not out hunting for rare plants he does a little guiding, but guiding is a hard call, even up here where you have 700 kilometres of river water at your disposal on 13 different streams. Again, it’s the uncertainty of the weather that unhinges the prospect of a steady run of guiding. A few years back Tony stepped off the conveyor belt in Johannesburg, packed his bags and since then he’s lived the quiet life in Rhodes following the siren call of wild flowers and trout. He lifted the pot of coffee off the stove, lit his pipe, and said, “You know what, this life is working for me. I’m not always sure where my next buck is coming from, but I at least I always know where to find a bunch of wild orchids in the season!”

*

Carien and I  looked at a few houses that were on the market in town – I have this dream of owning a cottage in Rhodes some day – saw one that would suit me fine if I had the money – then popped in to see Dave Walker at his inn, Walkerbouts. His place is something of an institution in Rhodes – as is Dave, I suppose – at least in the sense that if you visit the village and miss out on popping in here you might as well say you went to India and missed the Taj Mahal. Dave is one of those self sufficient and inventive guys you meet from time to time. He grows most of the greens his hotel needs, cold smokes beef, pork and trout, makes superb pizzas, started a brewery on site then sold it and has just started making cheese. He also built a ‘bothouse’ just off the back of the kitchen, a room made from upended wine bottles that let in just enough light and warmth to grow out his seedling herbs and vegetables without the insidious risk of frostbite.

Dave Walker outside his ‘Bothouse’

But the visit was longer than planned and we must have left Rhodes around 4.30, or at least late enough for Carien to be worried about the gathering clouds. Five minutes out of town the Godfather of all storms hit us; rain driving in violently like bullets from a thousand machine guns. The road turned to mud, rain hitting the soaked ground so hard it bounced back into the air and left a hovering haze of brown mulch as high as the bonnet. I could see nothing beyond this liquid brown screen, couldn’t pull over – we’d have been in a ditch all night – couldn’t stop because I had this vision of some farmer smacking into me from behind. At times the intensity of the storm lifted and I relaxed, but as quickly it would worsen again. It was a long, slow, crawling, slippery thirty minutes of dangerous driving before the rain settled to being just pretty hard.

 

Coming back along the road to Birkhall the storm eased, but the tiny rivulet running alongside Birkhall had become a torrent of gushing water fifty metres wide. It was flowing downhill at speed across a green pasture, leaving tiny green islands on which newly shorn sheep were clustered like shipwreck survivors to rafts. The Sterkspruit had burst its banks. The farmyard on Birkhall was bedlam. Neighbours had poured in to borrow canoes, rafts, tractor tubes, anything that floated. They were going out to rescue their sheep from the islands. Philip Gush’s wife swept past me, soaked to the bone with a canoe on her head. And the rain was coming in hard again.

The Sterkspruit at Lindesfarne bridge just after (above) and some days later. The water was a meter over this bridge.

The Sterkspruit in quieter times, or as we prefer it, turquoise with mystery and the promise of big rainbows

Later that evening everyone gathered in Basie’s lounge. Sarel Steenekamp, Basie’s neighbour was there, unable to get home even though you can see his house from Basie’s front veranda because the Sterkspruit was a metre high over the Lindesfarne Bridge. He left after one o’clock that night when the bridge was safe. Most of the sheep were saved.

 

It was also the evening I got to meet a couple of young fellows from Cape Town, Gavin Schneider and Gavin Duveen. They had turned up on Birkhall hoping to get some advice on the best route through to Welgemoed that night, a farm 30 odd kilometres up the Bokspruit road. They got the right advice, then in the fashion of dedicated fly fishers we put the storm aside and agreed to fish a stream high in the mountains on a place called Gateshead, where I reckoned the water would be fishable within a couple of days.

***

Gavin Schneider bought Welgemoed a year or two ago and converted the old farmhouse into a comfortable fishing lodge. I knew the place from years back so I could appreciate the changes he’d made. He’d knocked down a few walls creating open plan spaces so that the kitchen flowed into a dining room, then into a lounge, then onto a wide patio looking out over the mountains and if you can’t exactly see the river you can hear it it’s that close.

Gavin’s new home on the Bokspruit

On our drive up to Gateshead there were signs of rain damage; debris trapped against bridges, at some places almost blocking the flow, land slips on the sides of mountains, deep crevices in open fields . We climbed up past Brucedell where there’s a wonderfully tall waterfall 100 meters from the road. You could see from the waterfall that the river was wild, but at every bridge we crossed the water got clearer, until after the long haul up to Gateshead we came to the first concrete drift. A piece of the drift was missing but we managed to thread by it. At the second drift there was a massive cavity on the upstream side that would have swallowed the truck’s left front wheel. So we stripped off shoes and carried rocks across the drift, gradually filling the hole. I inched the truck over, the two Gavins slowly walking backwards through the river watching the front wheel and giving me nervous hand signals that weren’t difficult to interpret except when the two of them gave contrary instructions as to exactly where my front wheels should be. It might seem like a lot of trouble just to catch a few small fish, but what made it all worthwhile is that Gateshead is in many ways an unspoiled wilderness paradise and we don’t turn our noses up at fishing places like this, even if it’s hard work. But you do need a developed sense of adventure and maybe a sense of humour as well. Later when we were tackling up I found I’d left my shoes on the far side of the drift.

The river was wide and running full enough for the current to pull hard on your legs in the deeper runs. Duveen  went for a hike and Schneider G put on a dainty dry fly that was taken in the first run on his first cast. And by the corner pool above the old settler’s cottage he’d taken more than a few fish. The deal for the day was that I was supposed to give him whatever help he needed, but there’s not much you can tell someone casting a short line upstream with trout jumping on his fly in every likely spot, except, ‘Well done”.

The weather seemed to be changing subtly and when the tall mountain behind Gateshead cottage was covered in cloud we took a precautionary hike back to the truck. The drifts had been crossable, but only just. An inch or two of rain would raise the levels like a helium balloon and we could find ourselves stuck up there for who knows how long. While we hung around the truck hoping to outstare nature, chewing on apples and swallowing fruit juices, the sky suddenly dissolved to a soft blue, the wind dropped and the clouds disappeared. So we hiked a distance downstream and fished back up, both of us catching trout from the resinous-looking, deeper water until in all honesty I wasn’t precisely sure how many fish we’d actually caught. We didn’t miss the occasion for a little self congratulation. The drive out was a stroll and I found my shoes on the far side of the drift exactly where I’d left them.

Back at Gavin’s place we opened a beer and sat back on the veranda, cut a stick of Basie’s beef biltong, relived the day then solved some of the world’s more pressing problems.

*

After a while on a trip up to this part of the world your pulse slows to the pace of the place, and I was feeling settled, even though nothing about the weather changed, mainly not its unpredictability. Someone told me that a wise old local had said you never get a wet autumn and spring in the same year up here, which I guess is another of those myths that last until they finally get undone. This had been such a year, and I knew it would turn into a fly fishing paradise as soon as I left, which is more or less what happened.

*

The morning I left was icy, but a thread of sunlight was hitting the barn roof outside the kitchen where the dogs gathered like rock rabbits. I discovered again that Birkhall is a hard place to leave for a million reasons, but at least it wasn’t a beautifully sunny day with the Sterkspruit running as clear as spring water, bugs hatching, fish rising and swallows swooping. I suppose this is the one positive side to floods. It does make leaving a little easier.

 

There was rain on the drive back through the Karoo with headwinds so strong I had two hands on the wheel most of the day. At Aberdeen I dropped in on Philip McNaughton again and we lent against the truck chatting on the side of the road. It was cold and the clouds were low and black enough to look like he was about to get some rain.

 

At Melsetter I had stopped to collect the Roberts Bird Guide I’d left on Mike and Candy’s bar counter. The rest of the trip was one long tar bash, dodging 26-wheelers, drinking dubious coffee at noisy roadside places and avoiding the speed traps that have mushroomed on the edges of the towns along the N1. Basie phoned along the road to say the weather had cleared and the Sterkspruit was dropping fast. It felt strangely as if this trip wasn’t actually over; that if things kept getting better up there I’d have to give in and head back – within the month maybe.