Tony Mair starts to think about the coming season and where he will fish
My season closes, always, on September 30th.
In the last ten seasons I have broken my fast with a day’s grayling fishing just twice, and a day’s trouting if in the Southern Hemisphere, during our New Year break for some warmth and sun, or maybe a little sea fishing if trout are nowhere about.
Mine’s a simple routine.
I empty all my tackle from the back of Tonka Too, my trusty Volvo, and find sundry important bits I thought I had lost and restore them to their rightful box, bag or pocket; rod pieces are wiped and slid into the right slot in those lovely protective felt slings and tube; lines stripped of their spools, cleaned stretched carefully and hung for two weeks from the pipes under the roof of my storage facility, then wound back and clipped onto their reels which have already been cleaned and oiled, always remembering to loosen the drag to ease the tension on the working cogs. Jackets, vests and waders are cleaned and all ‘stuff’ removed from pockets, and all hung emptied from hangers and suspended from the pipeworks (this can surprise the unwary on entering said storage where a suspended wader has an uncanny resemblance to a swinging corpse, or so my wife asserted when recovering her winter wardrobe, once)
Fly boxes are reordered; leader spools low on tippet are discarded; redundant bits of anything are chucked away, and everything boxed for hibernation. That’s it.
As I write, sheltered inside our beach hotel in Hermanus, to the east of Cape Town, the sky is grey, and the sea greyer, but I am comforted because, from tomorrow, the skies above Franschoek, our next destination, will shine, and I have a day on the Western Cape streams on Friday when the forecast temperature may test my guide!
Just a single day of respite beckons, after a miserable three months, without.
Still a few months of waiting, however, and my thoughts have already considered wither next in my quest for Welsh counties; in which departements will I seek out some ‘farios francais’ next May when I drive our convertible down to the Cote d’Azure for its prolonged annual summer holiday; where will DF and I travel next together (Sweden, a new country, is looking favourite)…so much to look forward to!
Plotting begins in earnest, and I find the plotting almost as satisfying as the fishing. Almost!!
Read more from Tony HERE