There’s that Chicken Licken advert where a guy is going about his day as a small orange monkey perched on his back grows bigger and bigger and the only way, he can get rid of the giant monkey on his back is to smash some dirty bird. Once he has satisfied himself with a bucket of foul fowl, he is free for a while until that little monkey appears again. In a nutshell that is me with a spinning rod. I very rarely spin on any of the ‘travel’ trips I do but when it comes to the salt locally, I have neglected the fly rod terribly. I guess it’s largely a function of time on the water and the fact the flyfishing in the South African salt can be downright soul destroying at times or perhaps I’m bullshitting myself and it just became the most comfortable option.

What I do know with 100% certainty is that there are several situations where flyfishing is simply not possible in the salt and being armed with a spinning rod means you can still have a helluva days fishing instead of practising your double haul but in my case that distinction was becoming badly blurred. As we do every year, we made our way down to the Eastern Cape in April to spend a few weeks down at the coast and this was the first proper holiday for us since the birth of our twin boys 5 months prior. Having not fished for a while that orange monkey was King Kong level and I was jonesing hard. Prior to leaving I decided to do something I never thought possible; I left all my spinning gear behind and silenced my inner heathen.