ESF Contributor Andrew Fowler has sent us an extract from his new book "Stippled Beauties" We've read and love it and hope this will whet your appetite too.
There is a special time in the calendar. It is the time when the Lombardy poplars in the Bokspruit valley have turned yellow, and present themselves beside the stream for photographic sessions.
Lombardys
Pencil thin Lombardy Poplars line the river at Carabas on the Bokspruit, where Roy Ward plies a nymph. In runs like this the water is very shallow, as is evident here, but often a narrow sluice of deeper water runs just of the grass or roots along the margins, where Roy is focusing his attention.
It is a time when the trout are lively, but the yellowfish have all left down the Kraai River, to wherever it is they go. The first frosts will have occurred, or will be about to occur, and the likelihood of heavy rain has diminished. As far as domestics are concerned, it will not be the Easter weekend. Neither will it be government school holidays. For the sake of the schoolmaster amongst us, it will however still be holiday time for the private schools. There will be no fly fishing competitions or festivals either. The rivers will be clean, and deserted. This time spans seven days at best. These seven days are fly fishing days. They are heavenly fly fishing days, and we spend them in our Mecca, the highlands of the North Eastern Cape.
First Frosts
Autumn in the highlands of the North Eastern Cape sees the first frosts, which have the surprised visiting angler having to don iced-up wading boots!
The veld is brushed in pale yellows, and the distant hills are painted in dusky blue. Nature’s brush has touched the landscape’s hidden folds with striking red rose-hip dots, and sunshine washes sandstone crests in pallid slabs of khaki faded white. Deep cool shade hides in poplar groves and twisting river bends. The streams slide sharp and cold and gush in bursts of champagne runs beside tangled willow roots, and down into sullen gullies, where trout mysteries are born.
Rose Hip Dots
Roy Ward, framed by the bright red “Rosehips” that appear along the river banks of the Bokspruit and other streams in autumn.
Poplar Groves
Paul DeWet surveys the Kraai River at Kelvin Grove from amongst the numerous poplar trees there.
Sandstone crests
The twisting roads across the folded landscape, offer wisps of dust on exposed ridges, but carry puddles in deep brown earth, like matching saddle bags aside the road in dips and runnels.
Schoolboys
We stop at every bridge and gaze like star struck schoolboys, our eyes tunnelling down to the rocky bottom in search of shadows and dreams. Watching every gemstone, absorbing the watery colours: custard yellows, oxblood reds, and quartz studded greys, all smooth and gleaming in the dancing liquid light that sings sweetly of pulsing trout flanks. The trout flanks are the streambed in miniature. In a brief moment of still, the small fish in your hand is the dappled streambed itself. Chestnuts, and burnt match heads. Silverware and blushing streaks. Teal and pewter specks. And in an instant he has wriggled free and left you there with the water tugging like a persistent toddler at your trousers, which you ignore in the moment it takes you to free yourself from the illusion that is reality.
Our fly boxes have suffered weeks of preparation. They burst at the seams with rows of little flashbacks, and Zaks and Hares' Ear Nymphs. We have tied down to size eighteens and smaller. Little parcels of bug-like conformity in speckled partridge and rabbit, with subtle adornments of beads, tags and Flashabou or Krystal Flash. The dries burst from their little compartments and threaten to spring into the riffle before you have had a chance to lash them to that whisper of a tippet: The 6X or 7X that you have bravely decided to descend to this year. We tie plenty of dries, the idea being that a trout- slimed, soaked one can be switched out like a tired foot-soldier and replaced with something dry and clean with impunity. Something as stiff as crisply starched linen, as dry as gunpowder, and riding on hackles as sprung as a dawn spider web.
Sublime weather
The weather is sublime. Cold dew soaked grass wets your longs as you cross a morning field so fresh that you struggle to tell if it isn’t perhaps a melting frost that sets your teeth chattering. The clawing yellow sunlight of dawn lifts and whitens and warms until you feel its glorious glow through your thick cotton shirt. As you stand in the stream, the sunshine fading memories into the brim of your fishing hat, and the breeze ruffling the river valley, the warmth and coolness compete playfully for your day. Clouds drift against deep cerulean skies and towering hillsides. Birch stems glow white against the green foliage in the afternoon sun, and sheet rock glistens wet on a distant slope. When you stop for lunch of mussels and cheese and beer, a vista will have been prepared for you. Something gratuitously beautiful. Something ridiculously unnecessary in its sumptuousness, but appreciable to the full, by us who lie there in the grass on one elbow and invite our souls to soak it all up.
We tear ourselves from a lazy repose and return to immerse ourselves in an extension of our morning’s delights with the fly rod.
That rod will be a sweet small stream rod. Something light and responsive, and probably seven foot ten inches in length. A two or three weight, with our prettiest reel on it, and a freshly greased furled leader towards the business end. Tippets will be as long as we can make them, based on the absence or presence of a breeze, and a strike indicator for the nymphs is standard until so many trout have taken it, that it, and the nymph get replaced with a dry fly.
Small, beautiful, innocent and willing: Rhett Quinn holds a Riflespruit rainbow taken on his “ought weight” rod.
The trout are small for sure, but their innocence, beauty and willingness combine to deliver us magical fly-fishing experiences in the sweetest sweeping landscapes that your mind’s eye could ever conceive. A landscape that bathes in ever reddening sky as evening settles, and then falls subdued beneath pitch black skies and diamond swirls of silver stars.
April on the trout streams of our Mecca. It gives me goose bumps.