MARCH 2010

This March was a beautiful month for visitors to the Cape, but for fly fishers there wasn’t enough rain and a little too much heat for the stream fishing to be much good. And the lament was pretty universal around the country. No one seemed to be doing much good on trout streams.

But then we weren’t entirely fishless either. I had a passable day on a tiny stream with Leonard Flemming and Stanton Hector and a trip up the Holsloot River where for the first hour trout were so scarce we thought someone was fishing ahead of us. It was only when we got to what we call ‘the grassy section’ on Beat 1, a lovely long reach full of emerald green water grass, that we raised a few fish and saved the day. What was interesting is that scarcely a month before I was on this same beat during one of the really tiny bug hatches we get, this time Net-winged Midges, and the river came alive with fish, a few of them 16 inches long! My last trip we weren’t even spooking trout and you had to wonder where they were hiding or, worse, where they had all disappeared to.

Stanton Hector, master small stream fly tier

But then this March’s hatches were also generally poor. We did see a few pitch black mayflies once or twice, medium sized insects that were probably a Baetis species, though we weren’t sure. They looked too dull a black, the colour of coal, to be the pretty Choroterpes Nigricans mayfly we get, a shiny, almost iridescent black insect.

Leonard Flemming and Stanton Hector are both small stream specialists and good fly tiers. A while back Stanton gave me one of his extended-body mayfly patterns that is such a pretty work of art I’ve never actually risked fishing it. Talking of small stream fly patterns, Leonard remarked the other day that if he’s out of the loop for a month or two he loses the thread of things completely! It seemed over the top, but I think he’s right, or at least I know what he means. Hardly a week goes by when Ed Herbst doesn’t send me the website connection to yet another new and wonderful small stream fly pattern.

The water was low the day Stanton, Leonard and I fished, so things were predictably tough, the trout were tricky and there was a downstream wind, I could go on. But the day ended up memorable enough for a few unrelated reasons.

First, I was trying out a new pair of sunglasses I was given, by name Kaenon, polarized lenses that use a technology called C 91. On their web site they say, ‘Glass wasn’t strong enough. Polycarbonate wasn’t clear enough. Neither material allowed for adequate customization of tints and Light Transmission Levels. So we set out to develop our own, completely new polarized lens material. Kaenon’s proprietary SR-91 is the only polarized lens that combines the superior optical quality of the finest glass and the lightest weight, strength and impact resistance of polycarbonate. Only the best properties. No compromises. No short-cuts.’ They also describe the lenses as having unrivalled glare reduction (up to 99.9%), superior scratch resistance, razor sharp clarity and their impact resistance is apparently huge. Leonard and Stanton were both really impressed with them on the stream and so was I, but the fellow who was even more impressed by these glasses I will come to later in this news letter. He’s Jimmy Eagleton, the shark man. Yes, he specialises in catching sharks on fly! And no, I am not an agent for Kaenon and this is not a slippery way to give them some free advertising. I just think sunglasses are a key piece of fly fishing equipment and want to bring you up to speed with what I think is pretty impressive technology.

 
Leonard with the river reflected in the Kaenons 

Second reason the day was memorable is that I had my camera set on continuous shooting mode using a 200 mm lens with a polariser and a U/V filter up front. The camera was on shutter speed priority set to 1/500^th of a second. I followed one of Leonard’s drifts aiming the central red focussing dot right on the fly. The run looked promising, a pretty sweep of deep, resinously clear water swirling around a protruding rock overhung by a leafy branch. I fired the shutter button as the fly drifted. The images of the fly are in sharp focus and in the third or fourth frame, a trout miraculously appears under the RAB, but turns back in a classic refusal!  Lovely pictures to have got.

Drifting RAB


...and suddenly a trout appears under it

***

My first trip up the West coast after sand sharks was interesting. We parked the truck and headed for the fishing grounds in thick mist. Birds were leaving the water in huge flocks, mainly cormorants heading for the sea. The scene was ethereal, like something out of a Turner watercolour painting. But as the mist lifted we started catching the odd shark, and when the sun was well up we could sight fish for them. Craig Thom of the StreamX  fly shop was along with a friend, Carl van der Ness. Our ‘guide’ for the day was Jimmy Eagleton. I was using a 7-weight rod with a floating fly line and the idea was to get the fly, a green Clouser, alongside a shark and just keep up a stead, jerky retrieve. I hooked a monster that we managed to land. Jimmy said it was the biggest sand shark he’d seen in this area and if the term ‘beginner’s luck’ is clichéd, so what. That’s just what it was. By the time the tide was going out we’d all taken a few sand sharks. The moment of glory though went to Carl. He hooked a Blue Sting Ray that Jimmy estimated at around 35 kilograms, but he lost it when the leader popped with the ray almost on the beach. Jimmy had got outside the ray and was trying to prod it shoreward with the butt end of his fly rod. I just got the hell out of the water! The bird life was spectacular all day and I reminded myself what an integral part of the whole poetic tapestry of fly fishing birds are.

A Turner-like scene

Birds in the mist

Jimmy gingerly prods a 35 kg Blue Sting Ray with the butt end of his fly rod

Jimmy was over the moon with the Kaenons. There was a point there where I didn’t think I was going to get them back off him.  He said they cut glare like a laser.

*

A few days later Leonard and I were at Langebaan lagoon with Sean Mills, again hunting sand sharks. The water was clearer and the fish were easy to see. We were using Clousers, but Leonard had a bright red variant of this famous pattern on, and he cleaned up with it. He liked the red because he said the colour was easier to follow in the water. I think we must have tailed and released five or six fair-sized sharks in less than three hours fishing.

The author with a sizeable sandshark

 
Success!!

Sean Mills with a Langebaan sandshark

The sand shark is also known as the Guitar Fish, a flat, ray-like creature with a broad head. It’s a light, speckled brown colour that nicely camouflages it against the sand and I would guess they range from about 6 to 10 pounds in Langebaan.

Sand shark spotted in Langebaan

***

Sandwiched between all this was a visit to the Kraalstroom, a tributary of the Elandspad where I fished with Ryan Weaver and Graeme Field. At the junction the water in the Elandspad is noticeably peat-coloured, but in the Kraalstroom it is pale and clear. This is a pretty stream in every way, full of feature, rough structure, old trees and charm. Ryan thinks that the rainbows from the Elandspad, maybe even the Smalblaar, come up here to spawn. The stream is tiny. Much of it is roofed in by a canopy of indigenous trees, including ancient Cape Hollies, whose convoluted roots bind the stony banks into immovable cascades of wood and rock. There are magnificent specimens of Wild Almond, Rooiels and Wild Peach and the fynbos-covered valley slopes are scattered with Wabooms, a giant of the protea family.

Ryan Weaver on the Kraalstroom

Graeme Field on the Kraalstroom

We used dry flies on ultra-fine leaders, but the trout were that quick around the dry fly that we missed plenty. We eventually took a few on sunken nymphs and by early afternoon we were enjoying lunch, fresh-baked trout and salads, cooked by Ryan’s wife Jenna.  It was an experience to fish a river valley that seemed so lost in time; lichen-covered rocks, slender ferns, bright green moss, root-gnarled banks, an almost mysterious place, like something out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Tom Sutcliffe