Let's join Andrew Fowler on the next stage of his Mooi adventure!
As I walked from the restaurant I looked up at the mountain, and thought to myself that if Gladstone had a nose like that, he could probably smoke in the shower! Gladstone’s Nose dominates over Reekielyn cottage, and was to be my friend for a good few days.
Reekie Lyn cottage looks straight onto Gladstones Nose, which borders the south side of the river, and reaches an altitude of 2,200m ASL. On the north bank is the long line of cliffs extending out to the Riverside farmhouse, known as Mount Erskine, and reaching an altitude of 2,181m. To the south of the cottage is a rim of hills with their feet in the valley bowl of the Reekie Lyn stream. Those hills rise to an altitude of 2,083m. Straight ahead up the valley is of course Giant’s Castle itself, at an impressive altitude of 3,314m ASL. Then standing alone far downstream opposite lower Reekie Lyn and the Trout Bungalow is Kamberg mountain itself, at an altitude of 2000m. The section of river that I fished started at an altitude of 1,800m ASL on Game Pass, and falls over the 26kms to an altitude of 1,530m at the lower boundary of the Trout Bungalow.
It is funny how if you stare at a thing like that long enough it starts to morph into a grotesque form, a bit like a word does when repeated too much. The secret is not to think about them too much. Words and mountains that is. So it is with flyfishing in awful weather. If you think about it too much you just won’t go out at all. My planned companion for the day, the second day that is, had not arrived. Who could blame him! Sunday had dawned cold, and with a howling gale. I really do mean a howling gale. The small pond in front of the cottage even had whitecaps on it, and I had awoken to what I thought was a vehicle, but was actually the wind tugging at the building as though it wanted it. Wanted it like Kentucky fried chicken to go…a takeaway. I was a bit slow in getting going myself. It is not that I contemplated not going out, although, I confess that I did do that, but it was just that it was Sunday and it was cold, and I had walked over ten kilometers the day before, so I allowed myself the luxury of a slow start. Like I say, I had thought of staying in. The notion of a day wrapped up warm in a mountain cabin on my own, with just my thoughts, and blank pages upon which to write, did hold some appeal. But in the final analysis I recalled some lines from a Bob Segar song in which he sang “I could go east, I could go west. It was all up to me to decide”, and I was smitten with the idea of my absolute freedom, and that I had a rare opportunity to adventure at will, and make memories. After all, I could sit in front of a keyboard any time, but now I had a windswept landscape at my feet, and best I get out there and get me some of that.
I did allow myself to drive down to the roadside stile, and in so doing cut about two kilometres of walking off the day. I figured that it would have just been walking along a road, and who wants to do that!
So I set off towards the restaurant, and on across the tops of the hills, aiming for roughly the end-point of my previous day’s walking and fishing.
From the hilltops, with the relentless wind rushing in my ears and the grass buckling in great waves like those upon the ocean, I could see that the river from the previous day’s turn around point, remained a thread obscured by an impenetrable jungle of wattles. I wanted none of that! I figured that apart from my indulgences of a late start as well as driving to my start point, I would skip about a kilometer of wattle choked river and start in where it is pleasantly clear.
That is what I did in the end, walking down beyond the seldom seen fishing club sign on the Reekielyn bottom boundary fence (few fly fishers venture all the way down here), and starting in at a good looking glide.
Seldom seen signs.
After I published my first book, a number of people asked me to take them fishing, to show them how to fish a river. That was very flattering, and of course my natural inclination is to say “yes of course”. The problem is that we are all busy people, and the chances of my free day lining up with Joe Soap’s free day are slim. Coupled with that, on that day, I will probably have an old friend who I haven’t fished with in months, and I will be foregoing that other opportunity. But quite aside from my feeling guilty at not having put aside time to fish with Joe Soap, I have to ask: Why doesn’t Joe go off and give it a bash. Why is he waiting for me? I am really not a hot-shot fisherman, but anything I did pick up was from years of giving it a bash. Now people want to share in the end result. I don’t blame them for that, or hold it against them, but what happened to giving it a go, and then coming back with the questions you need help figuring out. Someone once asked me to take them to Reekie Lyn to show them where the bottom boundary is. Um…....there is a sign on the fence ….you walk downstream until you see it. Yes, you walked a long way. Did you come across the sign? No? Then you probably didn’t go far enough. No, sorry, I won’t show you.
When setting up at the car I had made a few carefully thought out decisions. One was to bring enough ingredients to make more than just one cup of coffee. Another was to ditch my fleece, and instead to wear just a tee shirt under my fishing shirt, and use my rain fly over the top as a windbreaker. I know that despite it being cold, when I start hiking a few kilometers I always seem to sweat, and then I find myself shedding clothing which I have no place to stow. My other decision was to fish my 9ft 4 weight stillwater rod. I just figured that battling in a gale with a 3 weight all day made no sense, and I have thrown flies with the bigger rod, as delicately as I think I will ever need to.
Brown trout that rise to dry flies on lower river water in these parts as rare as tablecloths in vulture restaurants. But with all this wind, and thoughts of terrestrials being blown onto the water, I just couldn’t help myself, so I did what my friend Graeme would have done, and tied on a dry anyway. Graeme will stick with a dry fly all day and blank, just because he is so enjoying throwing it, and watching it ride the current, even when the rest of us are catching trout on nymphs. I like that. So I selected one of my favourites: Ed’s hopper. October is not hopper season. But like Graeme and his dry flies, I just can’t resist that gangly, springy fly sometimes, and I rather hoped that the browns might see it my way too.
They didn’t.
Why I like Ed’s hopper: I didn’t get it at first. I thought it looked unlike a hopper, and my mind was fixed on a Dave’s Hopper. But the thing about Ed’s hopper is that it is sparse, and athletic and minimalistic. It has barely any air resistant for casting in wind. It floats low, but never gets waterlogged. When you pull it, it kicks and wriggles. I tie it on an ultralight terrestrial hook with a massive gape and a whisker barb. When I hold it between my fingers on the stream bank, I fill with confidence, and when it lands on the water I actually tense up in anticipation of a take. You want that in a fly.
The wind also just got stronger, and it got colder. When I switched to nymphs the trout still didn’t see it my way. But fortunately I had coffee. I stopped and made coffee twice: Once just above the sign on the boundary fence, and then again up at Magic Pool. Somewhere in between, I stopped and put on my emergency layer. My emergency layer is a very clever little wind cheater type garment that my wife bought me. It is made for cyclists, and it fits in a tiny bag about the size of your cellphone. When she bought it for me, I told her it was the wrong thing, because it is not waterproof. It has saved my bacon many a time, as it did this day. It just tipped the scales, and I was warm enough to carry on.
Bless her soul.
The other thing that happened at Magic Pool, was that I lost a small brown. It just came off, as these things sometimes do. Or should I say “as they often do”. Far too often.
What doesn’t happen often is witnessing trees breaking in a gale. That happened at Magic Pool. The wind had either intensified, or the valley was somehow channeling it more at this spot. I had rock hopped across the stream to a point which I had been making myself towards all along. A spot where the rocks bask in the early afternoon sun, and where you have a cliff at your back, as well as a nanna berry and an Nchi Shi bush as a wind shield. These allowed me to actually light a match to get the stove going for that much needed coffee. And while I sat there basking like a dassie, the trees across the other side were bucking and every now and then I would hear a cracking as one succumbed.
Wattle trees succumb to snow and wind, cracking and splitting and falling over and trying to grow sideways. Encountering severe wattle infestations the day before had piqued my awareness of them on Reekieliyn. They have got worse! I was trying not to be my usual wattle warrior self on this trip. Trying to relax and just do trout and coffee and enjoyment. It wasn’t working. I was scanning and evaluating and planning and estimating the number of man days required to get rid of all these young invaders and prevent one of my very favourite places from becoming like the kilometer of river I had just chosen to pass by. Earlier I had spotted a cave above me, and I clambered up through a thick stand of the invaders. It turned out that the cave was very small, and didn’t contain any bushman paintings. I rather thought I may make some amazing discovery in this seldom visited valley, but alas , it was not to be. What I did notice, is that the bare ground, as well as the pull of several downed wattles was creating an impending landslide. At the base of the small cliff, there was a gap of about a centimentre between the rock and the soil. Looking around me, I could identify the sheer line. I was standing on the unstable bit. I got off quick. Someday soon about twenty tons or more of soil is going to slide down the slope into the river. I banked the wattle count exercise and put it out of my mind for later. Well. I tried to anyway.
When I got to Krantz Pool, the wind was alternatively blowing upstream and downstream. The pool lay in just the right direction to form a strange sort of wind trap, and occasionally a wind gust would drive water up into what looked like a wake of a hippo, and the entire pool would then wallow and suck and lap, like some scary monster. Further up, sheets of water were being driven from the surface and spraying out over the rocks and the veld. My casting was getting decidedly less accurate too. On occasion the wind would die, and then my misjudged cast would slam the fly into the pool with a complete absence of grace. My hat kept blowing off too. It was getting ridiculous. I headed out of the valley, via the restaurant. No. I did not stop to eat.
That restaurant that I have referred to already, is of course a vulture restaurant. Of course. There are no other restuarants out there on the upper Mooi. Farmers have cattle that die. They need somewhere to dump them. So they tow the carcass out onto a rocky promontory and leave them there in case a vulture is in need. I have never witnessed a vulture feeding at the restaurant at Reekilyn, but that is probably just a sign that I don’t spend enough time there. Many of the carcasses I see there are picked clean. There is a restaurant on Reekie Lyn above “Cow Drop Pool” and another on Riverside on the south side near the lower boundary. There is a colony of cape vultures on the cliffs above Game Pass. If you are lucky you may also see a bearded vulture (Lammergier)
Later the cloud would lift momentarily, revealing a healthy dusting of snow on the mountains. I chased a bull out of the garden, brought the wet socks in off the porch railing, and put on some long johns. Tomorrow, I thought, I could go east, or I could go west. It was all up to me to decide.
Read more from Andrew at his excellent blog