FEBRUARY 2010

DISAS

I found a bunch of blood red disas (Disa uniflora) right alongside me on the bank of a tiny, Western Cape mountain stream I occasionally fish. I’ve seen them only a few times before, on the upper Witte and the Witels, but that was years back and they were typically high up on the moss covered edges of waterfalls. This time the plants were right there alongside me. I went back just to look at them – Ok, and to fish the stream – about three or four times that month. Then as February bled into March and temperatures climbed and they were suddenly gone. A friend from the UK said it was probably the most impressive natural floral sight he’d seen in his life.

UPPER LOURENS

I got back pretty tired after a trip to the Upper Lourens with Ed Herbst where it runs in a high kloof above Somerset West. It’s a fragile stream up here that hardly gets fished. The trout are also somehow different-looking and more difficult than those lower down the valley. They have a broader, more pastel-orange band and we think they may be a strain of McCloud River Redbands, but that’s more romantic than scientific thinking. They’re also pretty spooky so you have to belly-crawl the holding lies like a rock lizard and any sign of drag and there gone.

We took a few on dry flies, none of them as big as they get in this stream, but I never heard Ed complain. He loved the place. We got the better fish fairly close to the source where the stream opens a little and you see ferns and moss and green lichen on the stones. It’s the really pretty part of the Upper Lourens and not far the source either. I can’t work out why the fish get bigger right up here other than to imagine that it might have something to do with the altitude, morning cloud cover and so cooler water. But I’m guessing.

The walk out is always a steep, dangerous, downstream rock-to-rock jump that I never enjoy. When we decided to pack it in for the day I thought a smarter move would be to climb out and make for a ridge I could see above us and then just follow the ridge back. Since the fire up here a year back you can climb out of the stream here and there. Before the fire you had no chance.

The climb up to the ridge was longer than it looked and a whole lot steeper, in fact at one point we nearly called it off. But once we were on the crest the going was easy except I didn’t take into account two ravines that cut across our path. They were thick with burned fynbos and had tinkling little rivulets in them. When we eventually crossed the main stream again Ed spent some time nearly submerged trying to cool off. We were black from the charred branches, an hour and a half behind schedule, exhausted, but still not complaining.

CUL DECANARD (CdC)

All us small stream fanatics here in the Cape are using plenty of CdC in our patterns these days, or else just tying flies with CdC alone. The number of patterns – nymphs, dries and emergers – undergoing CdC makeovers is hard to keep up with, but the main one seems to be the Elk Hair Caddis with CdC added. It’s made a great pattern better but there’s even a CdC version of the RAB now that I’ve seen and rather like.

The reason for CdC’s popularity is easy to understand. CdC flies present more softly, they float well, look buggy and the fibres trap tiny bubbles of air. All of this on the understanding you are using quality CdC and not poor stuff. Craig Thom wrote a clever article on this in the latest issue of Piscator (See, ‘Not all CDC is born equal – CDC Vs Marabou – The Challenge’, Piscator No 141, November 2009). But first prize for a simple, effective new CdC pattern came to me by kind favour of my friend Ed Herbst. It is the most brilliant, easy to tie CdC sedge pattern I have ever used. It works like a dream, looks realistic, ties in minutes and takes fish. Ulf Hagstr?m wrote the piece Ed sent and ascribes the fly to Johan Klinkberg. It’s as simple and as brilliant as Marjan Fratnik’s famous CdC caddis pattern, the F-Fly. For an illustrated guide on how to tie it go to http://elmerfishing.com/en/bindbeskrivningar/torrflugor/cdc-sedge-f-fly-variant.html .