Internet Fly Fishing

by Ed Herbst

In 2006, Ernst and Anchen Stofberg, a couple who farm at Rawsonville about an hour’s drive from Cape Town, gave me the opportunity to live in a house on their farm, Dwarsberg,  at a very reasonable rental.

I will always be grateful to them for this because it enabled me to take early retirement from a work situation which had become very unpleasant and ethically untenable and, for a fly fisher, it was a dream situation.

The house I rented overlooked the Holsloot stream and it was very much a home from home because Tom Sutcliffe and I had fished the stream for two decades and our friendship with Ernst and Anchen had led to two of the guest cottages on the farm being named after us. You can visit their website at www.trouthaven.co.za.

In summer it was an idyllic existence. Firstly, Dwarsberg is a fuit and wine farm – its wines are sold through the nearby Daschbosch cellar (http://www.breedekloof.com/daschbosch.html)  -  so one was constantly surrounded by farming activities. Furthermore, the valley is rich in birdlife and I had a resident mongoose family that kept me entertained. The winter, however, was cold and lonely but I had 24-hour, high-speed internet connection and unlimited time to research my interest in the multi-faceted dimensions of fly tying and fly fishing.

Initially, I just printed the articles I found interesting and kept them in lever-arch files. I then realised that if I created folders on my computer and gave them all the same prefix – in my case FP (for fly pattern) Web Pages, they would all be grouped together in alphabetical order. This meant that I could highlight them and copy and paste them to my CD/DVD burning programme – in my case the ubiquitous Nero.

Four years later, “Ed’s FF Web Page Collection” on DVD has become a fly fishing and fly tying database of note – I call it “Fly fishing’s Microsoft Encarta.”

It contains thousands of web pages in the following folders: Alderflies; Ants; Bass; Beetles; Blackfly; Caddis; Carp; Casting; CDC; Clyde-style Wets; Deer Hair Flies; Dry Flies; Emergers; Entomology; Epoxy Flies; Float Tubing; Foam Flies; Fly Tying Desks; Fly Tying Tools; Gear; Hackles; History; Hooks; Hoppers; Inch Worms; Knots; Leaders; Macro Photography; Marine FF; Mayfly; Micropatterns; Mullet; Nets; Nymphing; Parachutes; Realistic Flies; Reels; Reviews; Rod Building; Silk Lines; Small Streams; Snowshoe Hare Flies; Soft Hackles; Speed Tying; Split Cane; Stillwaters; Stream Improvement; Tactics; Terrestrials; Tips; Travel; Trout Behaviour; Tube Flies; Ultralight Rods; Vises and Yellowfish.

I add to it constantly. I have a Favourites list containing dozens of websites but there are a few that I visit almost daily. The first is smallflyfunk.com because I am interested in micropatterns but also because it has home page links to a variety of other interesting sites and it lists when they were last updated.

Other sites that I find worth a regular visit are swittersb@wordpress and, for the latest fly fishing news, midcurrent.com. and two blogs; Trout Underground and Singlebarbed.

Despite the number of web pages in the collection it still only takes up half the capacity of a DVD so it looks as though I have several years of adding to this database before I have to think of alternatives. Hopefully, by then, DVDs with even greater storage capacity will have become available.