Shadows on the Stream Bed

Shadows on the Stream Bed by Tom Sutcliffe (Platanna Press, 2009) 383 pages with 40 pen and ink drawings.

Writes Ed Herbst:

It is said that just as few Parisians have climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower so have the majority of Capetonians not taken the cable car to the summit of Table Mountain. Those who live in the beautiful pastoral landscape of the Eastern Cape Drakensberg are probably just as guilty of taking their surroundings for granted but, for dedicated fly fishers around the country, the dream of an annual pilgrimage to fish these rivers and streams is what sustains us through the heat and haze, the hustle and bustle of city life.

And there is no more dedicated pilgrim to this area than Tom Sutcliffe’s book, Shadows on the Stream Bed. In it Tom covers the wide landscapes of fishing from Lady Grey to Barkly East, Rhodes, Maclear, Ugie and Dordrecht.

The Eastern Cape Highlands form a constant theme in Shadows on the Stream Bed, starting in chapter one, “Undiscovered Fly Streams” with the little tributaries on the Naude’s Nek Pass that few locals bother to fish, but which provide a pristine and almost unknown canvas for Tom’s literary brush, a chapter of the lakes of Highland Lodge near Dordrecht and ending in Chapter 23, “Barkly, Rhodes and Mountains of Trout Once More.”

But if Barkly East, Rhodes and Maclear, and the people in this area, provide the main current in the book, there are many other diversionary and entertaining tributaries; fly fishing journeys to the Okavango Delta and South Island, New Zealand, the perils of flying light aircraft in search of fly fishing, fishing camp food and camp cooks in a delightful chapter, Good Trips and Bad Trips and, in the Pucker Factor there are some salutary thoughts on why mountain areas and their rivers need to be treated with respect and circumspection.

Fly rods provide the input for two chapters, Lightness and Small stream fever that describe the evolution of ultra-light fly fishing and in the chapter, Bamboo Tom describes the resurgence in interest in split cane fly rods produced in the century-old tradition by superb South African craftsmen such as Steve Boshoff and Steve Dugmore.

Tom, as those as who have met him, will testify, is very much a renaissance man – writer, painter and highly regarded medical practitioner– and one of his paintings adorns the book cover while his line drawings punctuate the chapters. Those who know him, however, say that the advent of digital photography gave him a new artistic avenue to explore and the chapter, Catching fish on camera is the best exposition on digital photography I have ever read.

I tend to judge a book by the regret I feel when I turn the final page and I would have been a lot happier had this book been twice as long as its almost 400 pages.

It is an outstanding addition to the lexicon of South African fly fishing literature.