I was on my second hosted tigerfish fly fishing trip to the Okavango Delta armed not only with the usual clouser minnows but also with some new ideas incorporating rabbit zonker strips. Staying at the lodge was a well known South African guide with two clients from Europe. In the morning as we were heading [...]
“When the creative drive disappeared, it was clear I needed a break.” 34-year-old LeRoy Botha is a product of reinvention. After a decade as one of the Garden Route’s most well-known gigging musicians, the oke was tired. Creatively and artistically. No longer… And it is a beautiful thing. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have [...]
In the previous post, ‘As long as it’s black and red’, I discussed the use of a fairly light-weight hook, the Dohiku #12 wet fly hook (type 644) to tie relatively sparse Zulu’s with variable sink rates – I have more recently also started using the Hanák #12 stillwater & wet hook (H 260 BL) [...]
...ABOUT WHERE YOU GUIDE? Simon Hunter Bunn of Hunter Fly Fishing, our High 5s guide in issue 14, lifts the skirt on the rivers he regards as his home waters. 1. Quality waters - everything else is just a bonus. Where I work in Slovenia, the crystal clear water of the Soča River is absolutely [...]
The Evolution of the Bubble-butt Beetle by Ed Herbst If you Google Philip Hills + Persistence Pays Off On the Smalblaar you will find a 2005 Piscator article on the website of the Cape Piscatorial Society which gives an indication of how even the most selective trout rarely ignore a properly-presented beetle pattern. A growing [...]
IMAGES BY DOUGAL PATERSON About 5 years ago, Warwick and I spent pretty much every Wednesday night around his fire pit in his backyard. Our mutual love for kakpraat, overly large fires, beer and other mood enhancers saw us spending many nights into the wee hours of the morning solving the worlds problems, while our [...]
This is a basic zonker streamer that I tied to catch some of our larger freshwater predatory fish. The colour combo is based on other effective streamers, especially tigerfish streamers, used across Africa (I took a page from Malcolm Meintjes' zonker tiger flies as displayed in the FOSAF Favoured Flies series). I’ve only been fishing [...]
This post has been in the pipeline for a while (here's Part 1), but the completion of this project was agonizingly slow. The finished product is absolutely everything I envisaged. In terms of desk space, I elected to make it as open as possible to avoid clutter. Some of the essentials on the desk are [...]
This is a follow-up post on Dubious Distinctions, going into more detail about how I catch carp on fly in the Western Cape. I put emphasis on the Western Cape as carp seem to be a lot more reserved, generally taking smaller patterns, in the waters of this province. This is as technical as I [...]
I have a fairly stressful job and although I enjoy what I do, there are times when I simply need to clear my mind and get away from it all. Unfortunately for most of us, it’s not possible to live the life of a quasi-guide like Dre does and time on the water is all [...]
