Think you are obsessed with fly fishing? Brett van Rensburg, protea fly fishing captain, built a dam in his garden in Midrand to practice in. Not only does it have brown and rainbow trout, but also five indigenous species, and to top it off, while over a million litres of water a day is circulated through the dam, he also built a small river section with changeable pumps and jets to simulate different river conditions. Between daily practice on his dam, to being an active member of the South African Fly Fishing Association (SAFFA), Brett answers some questions to bring clarity to the competition fly fishing scene.

Explain competition fly fishing – How does it work?

Simply put, you’re given a piece of water to fish for a period of time. The idea is the person who catches the most fish off that piece of water would win that session. Fish size can also play into it but typically the individual who catches the most fish is going to win the session. During a competition, anglers rotate through different sectors so that you’re not fishing the same piece of water.cA typical South African provincial trial would probably be made up of three sessions. A group of 10 anglers would rotate fishing in an upper river section, a lower river section, and then a stillwater, testing all your skills. In each session you’re trying to catch as many fish as possible so that you can place as high up in that group as possible. If you place first in your group, then you only carry one point. If you place 10th in your group, you carry 10 points. At the end of the competition, after all three sectors have been rotated through, the person with the least points wins.

Throughout competitions over the year, those points add up to give you a national ranking. After every session, the leaderboard changes, so you’re continuously tracking who’s ahead of who and the medals being earned.If you look at a South African national event (inter-provincial), the team medals are always the more sought-after medals, because an individual can get a very good beat draw and win a competition, even though they might not necessarily be the best angler there. However, even if you get a handful of bad beats over three or five sessions, the top anglers tend to find their way to the top. At a team competition, it’s fairer because you have five anglers fishing five beats each, so over 25 beats fished it tends to even out very nicely.

How much of a factor is fly tying in comp fishing?

At National Championships, there’s a fly tying competition every year to test skills and make sure that an angler’s fly tying is evolving with their fly fishing skills. If you look locally and internationally, the venues that you fish are typically very remote – and there are no fly shops near you. When you get on the water for your training days and your practice, you start to pick up techniques and flies that are working really well – different bead sizes or colours. If you don’t have those flies to match any situation in your box, you’re screwed. You need to be able to tie them up at the venue. So having the ability to tie a complete assortment of stillwater and river flies is critical.

At the recent world champs there were three or four patterns that were very unusual that we had to tie up on the spot. Obviously, I also carry my favourites, and the flies I have a lot of confidence in too, so it’s situational. On the rivers I’m probably carrying about 1,500 flies in my chest pack – variations of Pheasant Tails, GHREs, Hotspots, Tags, Blow Torches etc, sizing everything from #22 all the way through to #12, and then typically an assortment of eight dry fly patterns.

How has comp fishing itself evolved over the years?

15 years ago, at World Championships, it was probably more sort of semi amateur whereas now it’s very professional. You have a lot of full-time anglers fishing world champs and making careers in the fly fishing world. Today there’s a lot of planning, strategy, training and fly tying that goes into it, whereas I think 15 years ago you probably just had some good anglers from good countries that went through a less rigorous selection process, got into teams and went and fished. A decade ago, there were maybe four countries that could compete. Now we had 33 countries at Worlds, 20 of them with anglers that have abilities to compete closely. If you look at the sessions, the difference between a 15th place finish and a fifth place finish can often be one fish or, or just a couple of centimetres.

Our big advantage as Saffas is that we’re gutsy anglers. We’re fit, slightly younger, our work rate on the water is very, very high. The more experience that the same anglers get overseas, the smaller the gap to the European teams gets each year.

What about your fly tying prep before and during a competition?

Leading up to a competition, locally or nationally, we will probably will tie about 100 to 150 flies before fishing the national championship. At the end of a training day we just top up our boxes in the evenings. Usually beer is flowing, banter flying and you’re tying up what worked well or what you lost – that can be up to 30 or 40 flies every evening. On the final prep day before the competition starts, we have a full day of tying. While we’re at an international, we’ll probably add another 500 flies to the 800 we’ve tied prior to the competition.

Recently at the FIPS Men’s International in Czech Republic, the conditions changed quite a lot over the trip. We needed to be able to change from nymphing to streamer fishing in the river to dry flies as the fish started rising. As the sessions went on, the colours went more natural. The trout stopped feeding on hotspots and tags in the later sessions they fed more and very small natural Pheasant Tails and plain coloured flies. So you had to be able to accommodate that.

What materials do you take with you to a competition?

We all have briefcase bags we carry full of fly tying material. Again you just don’t know what’s going to work at that specific fishery. So you’re trying to cover all those bases.

I’d say the closer teams to us including New Zealand, Australia and maybe England, we’ll share a bit of information around flies and materials leading up to the competition, without giving too much away. After the competition, everybody’s very open around the flies that worked and the techniques that worked. I often find that the day or two after the world championships, there’s a lot of learning involved.

Within our team, the house table just looks like a fly tying shop of feathers and beads and hooks and other materials. Questions are flying “Have you got three beads for me? Have you got five hooks?” There is always that one guy (name rhymes with Fan Tractor) who is known to borrow everybody’s stuff on these tours. Together, we all work tricks out, experimenting with slightly different flies that we want to test the next day.

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Where does SA stand in the global competition fly fishing scene?

I fished my first international about seven years ago. And I think then we were definitely underdogs. So I medalled at the Commonwealth Games in Ireland and I think I’m only one of two individual medals that South Africa have, so we just haven’t performed internationally. International anglers at that time that were traveling, maybe didn’t share as much information. They tended to keep that information for themselves so that they could stay ahead of the rest of the competing pack in South Africa. So there was quite a large gap.

If you fast forward to today, I don’t think we viewed as underdogs anymore. At this recent World Championships, we were definitely viewed as a country to watch out for. We consistently come out at top 10 and are getting closer to medal positions. This year we finished ninth in the end, but going into the final session, we were sixth and only a few points of fourth place.

At all levels we’re competing. We had Richard Gorlei win a Masters gold medal at World Championships, winning the entire competition, the ladies have gotten stronger, our youths are getting stronger – and I think what really excites me. When you’re talking to these other countries around what’s happening in their fly fishing scenes competitively or in general, they seem to be shrinking whereas South African fly fishing is growing.

Our biggest challenge is the waters we have in South Africa don’t match European waters. They have big rivers. The way their fish behave and eat are very different to what we have in South Africa.

Talk us through a couple of the other international teams – who is South Africa competing against if not for 1st place?

I think all the European teams have a couple of advantages. They get to fish European rivers in all the time. Their geographical locations mean that attending divisional competitions is easy for them – fishing competitions in places like France, Spain, Czech and Slovakia, where anyone can easily travel. They also fish these conditions all the time. They have a better trained eye for identifying certain types of water that are strange to us, and overall have a richer fly fishing culture extending further back in history.  

Our big advantage as Saffas is that we’re gutsy anglers. We’re fit, slightly younger, our work rate on the water is very, very high. The more experience that the same anglers get overseas, the smaller the gap to the European teams gets each year.

What’s the pathway to representing South African fly fishing at an international level?

Typically you would look to join a provincial team. Each province has its own trailing system, majority of them running three to four trials every year. By fishing at least three of those provincial trials, you’ll earn points, which will contribute to your overall rank, through to the end of the year when they’re recorded. Gauteng is a very well represented province. We’re about 130 members, so we’ll have a quite a long ranking list of ladies, teams, youth teams, masters teams, and then the seniors ranking list. The top five will then compete at an A nationals competition. The next five will compete at a B Nationals competition.

Your first national ranking points are earned when you fish in a nationals competition. Either through making your provincial A team, or through fishing at B provincials and qualifying top 10, thus joining an invitational team at a nationals competition. Once you fish an A nationals competition, you’ll rank anywhere from one to 60 depending where you finish. And those results are valid for three years. If you come first in a nationals three years in a row, you obviously have three ranking points over the three year period, and you’ll be top of the pile. Over three years of competing, Your three year results are weighted evenly and they give you your overall rank. So to get to the Protea team, typically it takes most anglers three to five years of being committed, working hard, and doing well.

When you’re top 15 in the country, you then go to Protea trials where you put through your paces from head to head fishing, fly tying, casting distance casting, accuracy, weight ability, fitness, knot tying, leader tying. All challenges that are designed to see if you can perform under pressure. The national Protea team is selected based on both your national ranking how you perform at Protea trials. Only then would you represent your country internationally.

Explain the team dynamics for the South African team?

We want to team with a good dynamic and varied strengths. The role of a captain (myself) is to make sure that the team leading up to the events are prepared and physically fit. (You’d be surprised how much running around you do in a four hour river session. I’ve had four hour river sessions where I burn 3500 calories plus.)

The captain (myself) also makes sure everyone is spending time on the water, making sure that people are tying regularly every week to keep their eye in. We have a lot of mental sessions during preparation so that the team are confident and can negate the nerves. You can imagine getting on a bus in your group with anglers from 33 other countries, can be quite intimidating.

In the prep week, I will often pick your more experienced anglers in the team to spend time on specific techniques. The captain also weighs up four or five game plans. So when a guy steps on the water and they’re feeling overwhelmed, they can say, “Okay plan one is we’re going to nymph the edges. Plan two is we going to lay a dry fly on the flat water. Plan three is we’re going to swing streamers” etc. We want our team to be less nervous, more confident and to get the most out of the piece of water.

SHOP THE MISSION

What methods, flies and techniques have come out of competition fly fishing and made its way into the sport for regular anglers?

The initial nymphing or Czech nymphing techniques have evolved so much over the last sort of five to eight years. Initially we did a lot of Czech nymphing thing with the horizontal arm above the fly, whereas now we Euro-nymph at range with much smaller flies. So you’re covering a lot of water a lot quicker and you’re very quick on the bite.

Within nymphing, a lot of anglers are fishing a straight piece of coloured mono.

The Spanish dry fly leaders are 20 foot long, which ends in 8X. If you’re trying to throw a fly across three different currents at 14 meters and you need that fly to drift naturally, you just can’t do it with a regular tapered leader.

In stillwater fly fishing there’s been a move away from lots of false casts and trying to throw distance. Some of the best lake teams are literally loading the line once with the Belgium roll cast. Because we throw multiple flies, one cast means we don’t get wind knots.

When we bring these techniques back to provincials, other anglers learn these things and they just get a huge amount of enjoyment – catching fish in different ways and having different options and ways to catch fish.

Why do you think comp fly fishing gets so much flack?

People have an aversion to taking something that’s so pure and beautiful and adding a competition aspect to it but I also think they don’t fully understand it. Year after year I appreciate the special places I get to visit and people I get to meet. More than anything, we try to conserve and give back.

The provinces make a huge effort to support stocking programs. We do cleanups on rivers, we run programs to teach people how to handle fish, remove hooks, why not to use barbs etc. we’ve been on a big drive on using mono masters, so that tippet isn’t put into the environment. The goal of competition angling is to leave the environment in a better place than it was when you arrived.

I think maybe in the past comp fishing wasn’t as well managed as it is today, and there were certain practices that weren’t where they should be. FIPS encourages the drive to giving back into the environments where we fish and making sure it’s sustainable for the future. Competition anglers tend to handle fish really carefully. I think when people become more educated on comp angling or when they come and join the trials, they realise these things are actually huge amounts of fun and there’s a lot to be learned.

Do you ever switch off from competition fly fishing?

For me, walking out at 6am, mist coming off the water and just take a stroll and is pure meditation. So whether it’s my dam at home, in Dullstroom or in the Midlands, there’s nothing better for me than just walking out on the water, casting a fly and enjoying the experience of catching some fish. I use it as a way to switch off. I think fly fishing has that innate ability to make you just feel relaxed and rejuvenated. My wife is always on my case saying that I should meditate more and I say to her, “I do it all the time.”

What would you change about competition fly fishing if you could?

Overall I want to improve fish handling. We’re looking at developing a scanning app that will do the scoring live. This should negate the fish having to be handled. I think first prize would be if competitive angler can catch a fish, bring a fish to a marshal, and a marshal can view that it hasn’t been foul hooked, the facial recognition app should do the rest. The fish has very little strain, It’s released quickly and nobody touches it

“Where other countries seem to be struggling to get people to come to fly fishing, we can barely keep up with the number of people that are joining in each province.”

Within comp angling, I’m not sure there’s much I would change. I think it’s well formatted. I would just encourage people that haven’t tried competition fly fishing to give it a try, get involved with a club or a province and see what it’s about. Most of those who have tried recently have just loved the experience, loved the community & the learning and their angling has got so much better. Also people should look at how much we give back to the sport, to the communities, the local areas and rural communities that these fisheries sit in. The stocking programs we run, how much finance we bring to these areas and, and probably most importantly, how many people we’re bringing to the sport.

Where other countries seem to be struggling to get people to come to fly fishing, we can barely keep up with the number of people that are joining in each province. So that for me is brilliant, that more people get to experience how beautiful our sport is.

Tell us about your literal home waters?

I had always wanted something that I could walk out in the afternoon and throw a fly and catch some trout. The dam needed to be big enough to throw full lines on. When we moved in here, we started building the dam before we renovated pieces of the house. On the diagonal it’s approximately 33 metres and has a variety of depths to allow for different structure; certain pieces of the dam drop down to 3.5 metres.

It’s predominantly a brown and rainbow trout dam, however, to be able to fish it throughout the year I had to add some indigenous species too. I have small and largemouth yellowfish, small and largescale yellowfish, and a handful of mudfish too. I also have some albino Mozambique tilapia which are the bait fish, making the summer months quite fun because you can catch yellowfish on bait fish patterns.

The dam is designed with two 95,000 litres/hour pumps and an aeration pump just to move the water around. So the total water capacity is circulated through the dam every day. We move a million litres of water over a million litres of water a day through the dam, and the small river section also helps to oxygenate the water.

The dam is also built with training in mind. The main pumps push a six metre flow, while 21 other individual pumps and jets can be set up in different directions, different angles, and a different depths to allow a fake river flow through throughout  the dam. So if I want to fish dry-dropper techniques, dry fly drifts or practice your nymphing, I can simulate those different flow circumstances. It allows me to put in some fishing almost every day, whether it’s just to throw a dry fly, work on accuracy or drifts, work on my nymphing or to just get my eye in before competitions.

The dam is also an important aspect of our provincial team and community. We do fly tying and fishing events, head to head challenges, or just skills training. One fixed rule throughout the year is the five cast challenge. If it’s your first time fishing the dam and you fail to catch a fish in your first five casts, you go in starkers.

For the full redux on competition fly fishing, read “Different Strokes” from issue 53 of The Mission below. It’s free!