Equipment Outfitters

The depth sounder is the second most useful piece of electronic equipment for most small powerboats since it warns of shallow water. Also valuable as a navigation tool, a depth sounder can be used by the skipper to help pinpoint a boat’s location by comparing the indicated water depth against soundings on a chart. Some depth sounders have features that allow fishermen to spot schools of fish below the boat. Read the rest of this entry »

Snorkeling is a pleasurable way to swim gently along the beach or in clear waters where fish and reefs are in view. The detail from the surface, or up close in the shallow areas, is what most swimmers equate with snorkeling. However there is a darker, deeper, and extreme type of snorkeling that few would consider doing without a tank, if at all.

Blue water hunters are a combination of freediver and spearfisher, and swim down slowly into the water, careful not to disturb any of the larger, and tastier, inhabitants. The diver must maintain a state of calm and heightened awareness in order to get a glimpse of the big fish they seek to catch. Quiet, methodical movements are the only way extreme snorkelers will avoid scaring their prey. Read the rest of this entry »

Stories of fishing spring creeks, with their selective rainbows, slow, clear water and heavy insecthatches, have always captivated me. I have dreamt of fishing one spring creek in particular, the Harriman State Park water on the Henry’s Fork in Idaho. While South Africa is not blessed with spring creeks, the Witte River in Bain’s Kloof Pass, although a freestone river, possesses so many spring creek characteristics that it could well be called a freestone spring creek. It lacks the heavy insect hatches that make other spring creeks world famous, but holds trout that, at times, can be infuriatingly selective. Its waters are as clear as any other blue-ribbon stream and it has slow, flat- water sections that will tax an angler’s casting and presentation abilities to the fullest.

Some time ago Ed Herbst and I were wading the Witte’s quiet waters; by late afternoon we reached a section known to me as ‘Guy’s Glide‘. This slow-water section ends in a deep tailout, which poses presentation and concealment problems. The river’s wary browns almost always hold at the tailout in the shadow cast by the bank and, since the glide must be approached at close quarters concealment is always a problem. Coupled with this is the fact that the trout have ample time in which to scrutinise the angler’s offering during the fly’s drift through the slow water. Read the rest of this entry »

Because the spinners fall to the water’s surface and become trapped there with wings outstretched, trout have ample time in which to ingest them,feeding in a leisurely fashion while cruising in long rise paths. The mostprolonged sequence of rises to thesespinners that I have seen was a series offifteen at Hopewell, a large lake in EastGriqualand. Other anglers I have spokento have had similar experiences duringhatches of these mayflies. It is easy to understand why American anglers call these fish `gulpers’, since they often gulp down several spinners in one mouthful. Trout do not inspect each insect during these gluttonous feeding sprees, since their window of vision is extremely small at such shallow depths. However, any dry fly that does not resemble the adult in size and shape will usually be rejected outright, particularly if the pattern is a high-floating one. Read the rest of this entry »

I first met Ed many years ago during a fishing trip to the streams of the Western Cape: I had spent a long day on the upper Elandspad River with two friends and was making my way downstream when I happened across two anglers fishing a quiet run on the bend of the river. One waved me a cheerful greeting as I walked behind through the bush, giving them ample berth to continue their upstream angling. These two anglers, it later transpired, were Ed Herbst and Tony Biggs’s late son, Damon. Though we did not meet officially that day on the Elandspad River, I followed Ed’s writings with interest. His experiments with artificial flies interested me because he was forever importing unusual fly-tying materials to try in his patterns. To me, Ed is the Gary LaFontaine of South African fly-tying, and I believe that in the Xmas Xaddis he has developed a patternthat will come to be regarded as an African fly-fishers.

The Xmas Xaddis, like many successful South African dry flies, evolved on the fast, tumbling mountain streams of the Western Cape. Ed says the pattern is a combination of existing facets of fly design and two new materials - Cactus Chenille and nylon organza - which, when incorporated into a dry fly, significantly enhance its appeal. Read the rest of this entry »

The unparalleled DDD is without question the most famous dry fly in use on South African stillwaters today. The DDD was created by the now legendary South African fly-fisherman Tom Sutcliffe, a person who has channelled all his free time and energy into the pursuit of trout and all activities allied to fly-fishing. Tom graduated with a medical degree from the University of Stellenbosch, and it was on the streams surrounding Stellenboschthat he was taught the skills of fly-fishing by the late Mark Mackereth, an angler well known for his abilities to deceive trout with a fly. Tom’s occupation later took him to KwaZulu-Natal, a province renowned for its lake fishing, and it was on the lakes in the Impendhle and Dargle areas that the DDD quickly established its reputation. Read the rest of this entry »

Like ants and grasshoppers, beetles are terrestrial insects that do not willingly enter the water. When theydo, however, they are usually eaten by observant trout on the lookout for an easy meal, and consequently deserve the attention of all fly-fishers. Fishing terrestrial beetle imitations was perfected by anglers such as Vince Marinaro, Ed Koch, Joe Brooks and others who frequented the fertile spring creeks of the Cumberland valley in Pennsylvania. These creeks are home to large, shy, selective brown trout that often ignore hatch-matching patterns, yet frequently succumb to terrestrial insect imitations such as the Crowe Beetle and Letort Hopper.

My research indicates that anglers fishing the Pennsylvania spring creeks were using foam beetles as early as 1960. Vince Marinaro used a beetle consisting of a coffee bean glued to the hook shank, while Don Dubois used a pattern called a `Flure’ — a combination of a fly and a lure. The Flure was made by tying a section of oval foam to the top of the hook shank, but many anglers refused to use it because it wasn’t made of the traditional fur and feather materials. Today, almost every fly-shop sells foam body material. Read the rest of this entry »

Ants, which play an important part in the diet of trout, occur in every terrestrial ecosystem except in Antarctica. Because they forage for food in bankside vegetation they are easily blown into the water where they form an abundant food source for trout. When falls of flying ants occur on streams and lakes (this is not common) trout will usually feed selectively on them to the exclusion of all else, making for particularly frustrating fishing. While most anglers encounter ants at some point while fishing, and despite the fact that ant imitations often fool wary fish that may shun better-known and more widely used flies, almost all fly-fishers neglect the role of the ant in fly-fishing. Fly- fishers will find that it pays to carry a selection of bothwinged and non-winged ant varieties. These tiny imitations may save the day when fish begin to take ants that are trapped helplessly in the film. The best falls of the winged ants occur on hot, humid days, either during or after a spell of rain, whereas the terrestrial ants encountered along streambanks can be found on the water during any warm month of the year, especially when strong winds are blowing. Read the rest of this entry »

Most still water fly-fishers have fished damselfly nymph imitations, and patterns such as Hugh Huntley’s Red-Eyed Damsel are firm favourites in many fly-boxes. However, few anglers use the adult form of this abundant insect even though it can produce some spectacular action, particularly on days when the weather may seem too hot for enjoyable fishing.

Adult damselflies are easily distinguished from dragonflies by the attitude of their wings when they are at rest. Damselflies hold their wings folded together over the top of their abdomens, while dragonflies hold their wings at right angles to their abdomens. In addition, damselflies are not as large and robust as dragonflies, and are more likely to find themselves on the water, particularly during strong winds. Once on the water, they are unable to escape and are easy prey for an opportunistic trout on the lookout for a high- calorie meal. This usually occurs during the warmer months of the year when adults can be seen flitting over the water’s surface as they deposit their eggs. Read the rest of this entry »

Most South African anglers consider the Woolly Bugger to be a stillwater pattern. My confidence in this pattern as a producer of trout in stillwaters is such that I reserve an entire fly-box exclusively for Woolly Buggers in various colour and size combinations. While I suspect that the Woolly Bugger is also capable of producing some very large trout from the slower-moving pools on the lower sections of many of our rivers, I prefer fishing in the riffles, glides and runs and so cannot testify to the pattern’s effectiveness in these waters.

The Woolly Bugger is extremely versatile and can be used as both a suggestive and an attractor pattern. I fish it as a suggestive imitation in subdued tones during most of the year (alongside other great producers such as dragonfly and damselfly nymph imitations) and as a streamer pattern tied in bright colours during the winter months‘ spawning season, when trout often aggressively attack the pattern. Read the rest of this entry »

East Griqualand is reowned for producing oversized trout, and Stiggs Cathcart’s beautiful lake, Belmont, is no exception. When anglers first began fishing this lake several seasons ago it was producing wild, powerful rainbow trout which averaged over eight pounds. The evening before I tested the waters, one of my companions, Roland Walker, landed the smallest-ever fish from the lake, a trout of four pounds which cartwheeled over the water just as the last rays of sunlight left the valley; the largest fish ever taken, almost twelve pounds, had fallen to the rod of well- known angler Mark Yelland. I shivered with anticipation as I paddled out into the clear, winter water of the lake, that tested a frigid seven degrees Celsius on my thermometer. The lake was heavily weeded in its shallower margins, making them almost impossible to fish with a fly. A broad channel snaked through the weed in lazy bends, a reminder of the old riverbed that had once cut through the now flooded valley floor. It was in this channel that the majority of the fish had been taken, and as I finned towards this wide passage in the weed, I considered my chances of landing one of the lake’s leviathans. Read the rest of this entry »

The muddler minnow, or ‘Muddler‘ as it is usually called, is justifiably famous and is used throughout theworld with great success. It has its origins on the Nipigon River — famous for its large brook trout — in Canada, where it was developed during a fishing trip by the late Don Gapen, a well-known Canadian angler whose ambition it was to catch a world-record brook trout. After clamping his vice to a boat beached on the banks of the river, Gapen set about tying flies for the following day’s fishing. Little did he know that the pattern he was about to tie would become legendary.

The q was known as Gapen’s Special Fly or simply Gapen’s Fly. Gapen tied these flies by the dozen and sold them at his fishing lodge (called the Chateau Bungalow). Because of the pattern’s incredible popularity, his friends urged him to give it a name. He decided to call the pattern the Muddler Minnow in memory of the small sculpin minnows that lived in the Wisconsin streams and rivers he fished in his boyhood. These small fish were commonly called muddler sculpins or muddler minnows by the locals, and they produced large brown trout when fished as bait. Read the rest of this entry »

The Zonker, a baitfish imitation, is one of my favourite streamer patterns and has accounted for someof my largest stillwater trout. When trout begin to concentrate on small baitfish in the shallows, the action can be fast and furious, with strikes that leave the angler shaking with excitement. The Zonker is a superb searching pattern, especially during winter when trout aggressively hit streamer and attractor patterns, and it is also a good fly to choose when trout are visibly chasing minnows.

The Zonker was invented by Dan Byford of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and is one of the most realistic yet suggestive baitfish imitations available. It demands a fair deal of patience during tying and can prove a tricky patternto tie properly, particularly for novices. As with all patterns, the only way the fly can be mastered is to tie several, until all the problems associated with its tying are overcome. Read the rest of this entry »

How to make one:

1. Tie in two uneven strands of Flashabou halfway along the hook shank. The longer of the strands should be at least the length of the hook shank.
2. Select a marabou plume and tie it in by the butt, halfway along the hook shank.
3. Wind the plume forward in open turns, tie it off and trim the excess.
4. Tie a mallard flank or similar feather in by the butt directly in front of the marabou plume. The concave side of the feather should face the hook shank.
5. Take two or three turns of the feather around the hook shank in front of the marabou, tie off the feather and trim the excess.
6. Form a small, neat thread head, half- hitch and trim the thread. Apply head cement to the thread wraps.

The names pheasant hopper, Sparrow and Evening, Star may not mean much to most South African fly-tiersand fly-fishers, but these patterns are well known in the United States. Created by Jack Gartside, an angler whose reputation as an innovative fly-tier has spread, not because he has published any books or magazine articles but simply by word of mouth, the patterns are all extremely effective and, most importantly, are very easy to tie, making use of materials which are cheap and freely available. Read the rest of this entry »

During emergences of these Tricorythidae mayflies trout become extremely selective to the naturals, both in the nymphal and spinner form. I usually rely on a small nymph imitation during the emergence of the mayflies and a simple spinner imitation during the spinner falls in order to fool trout which gulp the naturals in the surface film. This is exciting fishing, but for the neophyte fly-fisher unaccustomed to fishing small nymphs and spinner imitations in the surface film, both the emergences and the spinner falls can lead to great frustration.

Prior to the spinner fall of these tiny mayflies, however, trout feed selectively on the emerging nymphs both in the intermediate water layers, as the nymphs make their way to the surface, and at the surface. This is often when trout can be seen bulging just below the surface, ignoring traditional patterns. Small nymphal imitations from #16 to #18 can be extremely effective but are not infallible. When the visibly bulging trout are gulping nymphs or spinners in the surface film yet still refuse suitable imitations, the White Death alone will, for some inexplicable reason, still take trout. Read the rest of this entry »

In the dying rays of the afternoon sun, I watched as trout porpoised softly on the surface. A Suspender Midgehad produced several fish up to two pounds in size, and earlier a large fish had stitched my leader through a thick mat of floating weed, forcing me to paddle over to the growth to retrieve it. The fish had been working a hatch of tiny midge pupae in the surface film, providing several hours of exciting fishing.

As it began to get dark, a warm, gusting wind started to blow, effectively ending a superb afternoon’s fishing. My three companions, all of them from the Cape, had failed to capitalise on the frenzied surface action and between them had released only a few of the lake’s residents. It had been a learning experience for them, as the lakes of the Western Cape do not provide anything like the consistent surface action of those in KwaZulu-Natal.

When the wind began to blow consistently and my companions in their float tubes displayed their obvious intention to head for the bank and call it a day, I realised that the midge fishing was truly over. Read the rest of this entry »