ON DISCOVERING SMALL STREAM GEMS

The truth is I’ve never really discovered a fly stream. Well not in the fullest sense, meaning you research an area, plan an exploratory visit, find a piece of previously ‘unknown’ water that’s way beyond beautiful and full of wild trout, but I’ve come pretty close on occasions. Like when Ed Herbst and I unearthed a small stream in the Pitseng area near Donie Naude’s farm Vrederus that Donie said hadn’t been fished in his lifetime.

We seemed to bounce and rattle for ages, driving right up into the arms of the Drakensberg, first through gently sloping grassland country, then into landscapes with hillsides dotted with bright green tussock grass reminiscent of the kind of the vegetation in the higher, colder parts of New Zealand. We pulled up where the track eventually ran into the stream.

It was a tiny and transparent stream, the riverbanks scattered with tatty willows and ouhout bushes, a beautiful stream even if the trout in it were small and sparse and tricky to catch. It wasn’t everyone’s idea of how a trout stream should be, meaning it was maybe too tiny and too fragile, but we don’t mind our fishing like this.

When you tackle little-fished, gin-clear, high-altitude trout streams, you naturally hope the trout in them will be conveniently naïve and co-operative. But these fish were in a stony stream that offered little cover other than in the deeper, bubbly basins. So as we expected the fish would be wary.

They were rainbows that held tentatively and spooked as quick as birds, thin, sylph-like fish that seemed to take on some of the glassy transparency of the water they lived in, mainly only easy to spot when it was too late.

Clearly, further downstream it takes on a few tributaries, grows in depth and we were told the trout get a little bigger.

While we were packing up Donie said he knew more unexplored streams just like this one. We were ready to leave and helped Donie load the truck.  We’d fished for a few hours and lost ourselves drifting dry flies through shadows and bubbles, watching for the fleeting flash of fish in the lips and current curls, setting the hook – simple, uncluttered pleasures that seemed to flow through my veins as if pumped there by my heart.

MARIO GELDENHUYS DISCOVERS A PERFECT GEM

Mario sent me some pictures of a stream new to him and his friend, Jade dos Santos who took all these pictures. He said it was in the southern Darkensberg area – never mind which side of the mountain!