Fly fishing for kob and grunter: During early March I had the good fortune to spend some time and fish my favourite spot away from home, the beaches and estuaries of Central West Africa. Now apart from the main attraction, tarpon, there are all sorts of other fish that makes this trip special. Especially the [...]
TOTALLY COMMITTED Nine to five. That’s how long I worked that flat today. The blazing sun burned me right through my shirt: I now look like a tomato with vitiligo. Also, I missed an appointment. Within an hour or two of fishing I felt as though I had a steel rod in my back, and [...]
IRONMAN SBS If you haven't read part 1 and part 2.1 of this series, may I suggest you do before working through this piece? If we’re all still friends after that, let’s tie this thing. Note: Pic heavy post, and I found some of the finer points quite hard to explain. I hope you can [...]
A muse, a rant and an introduction to the upcoming Ironman SBS I feel as though we need some emotional preparation. Even if I were immune to bouts of overzealous, extra-verbose circumlocutory elaboration, an Ironman SBS was never going to be a quick read. I recommend setting aside a few hours one evening, with some [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Glossy, durable, flexible and perfect for fly tying. In Pattex 100% Platon Trakoshis believes he has found the ultimate fly tying glue for building baitfish heads Glue. It’s always such a big question and discussion with fly tiers. “What did you glue the eyes on with? How did you make that head? What are you [...]
Sizeable, visible, and seemingly impossible, there are few fish as infuriating as spotted grunter. As much as anyone can figure them out, a select few like Jannie Visser have. Listen up. From pancakes and prawns, JAM and turds, these are his pearls of grunter wisdom. As pin-ups on the res walls of Stellenbosch University students [...]
….When you know it’s time to go. The research of Dr Paul Cowley and his team from SAIAB has shown that spotted grunter travel far less than previously thought. Or, at least, in modern times don’t migrate as they may have in the past. Results from one particular study showed that 95% of all recaptured [...]
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.
