For as long as SA fly fishers have been obsessed with grunter, misconceptions and heresies have spread about fishing for them. Noticeably, and especially in the Western Cape, many grunter hunters have focused almost exclusively on one ubiquitous grunter food, the mud prawn. But has tunnel vision inadvertently done us out of options? Yeah, maybe. [...]
My corruption of Herman Botes’ Papa Roach has come up in conversation quite a bit lately. It’s fair to ask why on earth I would tamper with this damn near perfect stillwater trout fly, but in my case the answer is simple: you absolutely don’t have to, but … you can. While I do believe [...]
For some years, I have largely ignored my closest fishing hole. Five minutes from home, the Garden Route Dam was once a pristine bass fishing destination. The near-black tannic water made for challenging fly fishing, but experimentation and perseverance paid off. It also hosted enough bluegill to keep a kid busy for hours. But then [...]
Disclaimer: In this article I’m going to attempt to untangle an accidental conspiracy that is sowing global confusion. Look, nobody’s getting hurt, but it’s everywhere. Although I do wish I was, I am not a qualified scientist. That said, I read, collaborate and investigate until I get to the bottom of whatever rabbit-hole I dive [...]
I remember standing on the dam wall at Thrift, my eyes shifting to and fro between two things. One, a large trout milling over weed beds less than a cast away from me, and two, my mate Kyle bobbing about on his kick boat in the distance. Kyle was too far off for me to [...]
For the past season or two, I have been obsessing over simplifying my fly tying. Of course, there are situations which demand high-spec, over-engineered flies like the JAM fly or the Game Changer. These flies take time to put together properly in order to get them to behave as they should. I love that challenge, [...]
I have often wondered when the original art of fly tying will finally be replaced by its modern incarnation, as fuelled by social media and the fly fashion show: fanatically dressed lures for fishing on fly rods. Much as I admire modern ingenuity and engage in hours of toil behind the vice in order to [...]
It’s the first of a three-morning stretch of epic grunter fishing and I don’t even know it yet. All I know is that two weeks prior I had a small taste of things to come. A new fly pattern in hand, I knew I’d dialled their number. Now I wanted an answer.
