Andrew Fowler continues his journey on the Mooi
When it comes to fishing cottages, Reekielyn is hard to beat. For me it is a river fishing cottage. Yes sure it has a small dam right in front of the porch, and it is stocked with trout, and there is a jetty and a boat. But for me the water in front is just for the foreground to the pictures of the mountains that lie in the distance. The real water is just off to the north. If you open a window on that side of the cottage, you can actually hear the waterfall on the Mooi River. Now that is something special! The cottage has everything I need: A warm bed, a fridge, a stove, microwave, kettle, and a hot shower. It is a wooden plank structure, and I will confess that when the wind got up, it had airconditioning all of its own. Warm clothing, hot showers and cups of soup sorted that issue out, and besides, with my fishing gear and books and fly tying stuff spread all over the lounge, it looked downright cosy: a sort of man cave away from home. The sabbatical allowed me to mess it up just the way I wanted to. I could put my wet wading boots in the middle of the lounge and hang my longs to dry near the oven, or behind the fridge, or wear them on my head if I so cared. No. I didn’t. By the end of the trip I was finding little coloured pieces of strike indicator yarn stuck in carpets and linen and chairs. The cottage comes complete with a couple of ducks, some reedbuck that graze just off to the side at sunset, and traffic that passes seldom enough that a passing car has you looking out to watch it. While I was there I think I saw six cars pass. In eight days.
One car that passed me while I was tackling up at the roadside gave me a fright. I wasn’t expecting it, and suddenly it was there. I got to thinking about that while I was slamming hoppers down on the stream in the wind. Somehow it felt OK, and I was quietly confident that I was not spooking fish when I did that. Why? Well because lots of things were falling in the water with a splat. So why not my hopper? The trout would have been expecting things that go splat in the wind.
Why a sabbatical?
From the first time I learned of the concept of a sabbatical, I liked the idea. Some people get their relaxation from lumping in front of a TV, or going sightseeing, or going to stay at a resort where they sleep a lot. There is nothing wrong with that, but I can’t sit still. I am not an adventure junkie (I once threatened to throw myself off a cliff tied to one of those elastic bands, but thankfully I came to my senses), I just need to be doing something. The idea of leaving normal life for a while, I mean leaving it completely, and doing something else, always held appeal. Even our usual escapes often include an element of domesticity. I mean, hell, while typing this a “tune” just came on the stereo, and what was it….the sound of a lawnmower! I needed to not hear a lawnmower for a while. I needed to be in a place where I could forget to check the phone or Facebook for messages. Of course fly fishing was it; something I can immerse myself in completely and forget about whatever else is out there. The first question most people asked me, was how did I get this past my wife? I don’t think I “got it past her”. She suggested it. I like to think I am always genuinely encouraging when she and her friends want to go off for a few days to some art festival, or when she needs to be away for a week on a training course she has elected to go on. Everyone needs a break, to stop them picking at the skin on their arm, or tapping their foot furiously. Hopefully I returned with my compass re-set, a little more grounded, and with my creative side refreshed. My wife sees value in me being that person, so she invests in it. I am very appreciative of that, and of course of her.
I did no training whatsoever for my sabattical. That is to say I simply arrived, straight from my office desk, and expected my body to carry me up and down the river every day, without complaint, pain, or discomfort. That seems reasonable for someone in his early thirties, right?
Jan Korrubel,on the other hand, was training for an upcoming New Zealand trip, where his host had warned him, he would be hiked silly. Jan’s training run, together with the fact that it was Monday, complete with forgotten camera and the like, conspired against his early start. His delay was welcome for me. I had woken to an ice cold cottage, more snow on the berg overnight, and a wind still pushing through at around thirty kilometers an hour. A delay meant that when my guest arrived I had had bacon and eggs and had sorted my tackle out and brushed my teeth and washed the dishes. Isn’t it amazing how that stuff takes a little longer when you get just that bit older!
Jan and I got talking tackle over tea. That’s what you do with a guy who is in the fly fishing tackle industry. It is also the kind of thing that gets you to the river at eleven am! But this was a holiday, and not a race, and the time spent catching up and comparing varying accounts of the same fly fishing history were a great deal of fun. Besides, the first hour on the river were bright and windy, and without trout.
At Walter’s Pool, a small fish rose, and then another. Cow Drop Pool produced nothing, but at the head of Tekwaan Pool Jan got a very pretty brown that must have been twelve inches long. After a quick photo session we stopped on the riverbank just below Picnic Pool and had a late lunch, and discussed strike indicators. I happened to mention to Jan that the pocket water in front of our lunch spot is probably my most productive piece of water on this river beat. (I didn’t mention it to Jan, but the piece just below Krantz Pool is right up there too). Jan replied that he had never taken a fish there! As we moved up, Jan pointed out some of his better spots, and several of them were ones I had never given a second thought to. Such is the value in sharing a day on a river with an experienced fly fisherman.
The other thing I got to share with Jan, was watching a respectable sized brown come up and take my strike indicator in a leisurely and confident rise, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. We both stood there on the river bank and watched that unfold in one of those long, slow-motion moments. Shortly thereafter, in the same run, I pricked a fish, and just above that I briefly had on a rather solid fish from a deep chute. And while this fishing action was hotting up, it was becoming overcast. It was also getting colder. Not that it had ever been warm. That morning I had seriously considered wearing waders. I don’t normally wear waders on a river; there are just too many fences and brambles, and in any event, it normally warms up to the point where you question whether the damned things are in fact breathable, and you wish you had left them behind. But on this day, and in my defence, it had started out at two degrees C. and the prospect of wet wading had seemed a little daunting. But in the end I kept on a body warmer and rain jacket all day and it kept me reasonably warm. Until the fishing action started to improve, then I really got cold. I still had my emergency layer (bless her soul!), but the fishing was all happening , so I was not going to stop to add a layer. In the next big pool I pricked a fish that turned in the depths, just enough that Jan and I both saw its belly. Jan then went on ahead, and I persisted, hoping for another fish in there. Persistence paid off, and this time the hook held firm, and I landed a beautiful sixteen and a half inch fish. My repeated whistles to Jan, to draw his attention to my success and to request a camera only paid off when it dawned on Jan that the persistent bird call he was hearing, was not in fact emanating from a bird!
Jan was having his own action…fish seen, risen, missed and the like, but like me, he was finding it hard to actually get a fish in his hand. At the next run a fish was rising, and I fooled it on a para RAB, but my tippet parted, and it was gone. Around then the now heavily pregnant clouds started to produce a drizzle that may have been sleet. I was struggling to change fly, with the fading light, and frozen digits. A few more pools, and we arrived at the waterfall, where we climbed out and walked back to the cottage in the rain.
Despite just one fish landed for each of us, we both felt elated and blessed to have had such an eventful day out. It really doesn’t take much to please a simple fisherman, does it!
That night it rained a bit harder, and the temperature plummeted again, and I sat eating a TV dinner and writing with a beanie on and with cold hands, realising that the only warm place was in fact in my bed.
The thermometer on the south wall of the cottage indicated a minimum temperature of minus 8 degrees C, and a maximum of plus 38 degrees! I do not know when the magnet was last pressed, so I don’t know what period this range represents. While I was there the temperature fell to freezing and reached a brief maximum of 25 degrees C. On the whole it was cool.
I awoke earlier than I had the previous few mornings, and having mustered the resolve to leave my warm bed, to switch on the kettle, I pulled back a curtain to check on the world. The world was white. Well, the mountainous part of my world: All the hills surrounding the cottage were blanketed in snow, and the early morning sun was just touching the tips of clouds and snowy hills. It was astoundingly beautiful!
Energised by the beauty of all around me I was dressed and sorting out the cottage and my lunch and my tackle in no time. When Terry Andrews arrived, the clouds had descended onto the hills again, but he did get a peak of some of the snow, while we had tea and got tackled up.
The Stillerus section of the Mooi, is distinctly different from Reekie Lyn. Above the Reekie Lyn falls, the stream is held back by that dolorite obstruction, and so it snakes its way across a flat and swampy area, turning this way and that. Meadow water I call it. This is typically water where you expect an evening rise, where the wake from your wading is an issue, and where glassy water has you wanting to sink the tippet ahead of your dry fly, if that is your school of thought on that particular matter. With the relatively low water levels, much of the water I remember fishing as a student was bit on the thin side. That is to say you could see the streambed with some ease, particularly when walking atop the high banks. Every now and then a very deep section would present itself. Or should I say, Terry and I would pronounce it deep, on account of us not being able to see the streambed. Then one of us would do the perilous descent down the steep bank into the crisp water below, and proceed up in the deep streambed, casting between the Nchi Chi bushes that line the tops of the banks. At one point I managed to not only perform a tailing loop, but to wrap the loop in the top of one of these bushes, in a messy and complicated affair that involved a lot of destruction of the flora, and which Terry aptly named a “tailing fuck-up”. I did not disagree.
Half the time, my eye was drawn away from the river to the fresh snow on Giants Castle off to the west. The air was crystal clear, and the sun was out, and the sight of the high white peak dominating the open vlei land in the foreground was spectacularly beautiful.
In a “pearler” of a pool, with a fast run entering some seriously deep water, I connected with a small brown which succeeded in shooting my indicator a full eight inches upstream, leaving no doubt that it had eaten my fly. Terry fooled a similar size fish just a little further upstream, and we had some fun photographing it, taking care to include Terry’s special rod, reel, and net.
Later my wife would send me a message about the fish I had caught, and I hadn’t even told her about it! But then if Terry witnessed you coughing on a mountain top, the chopper might just arrive to take you to the pneumonia unit, before you even knew you were sick. Such is the power of Facebook, and the valley is in line of sight of the cellphone tower up on Riverside!
As we progressed we found ourselves passing by a lot of water that we probably should have fished. The stream would disappear into a thicket of Nchi Chi, or bramble, and we would try to estimate where the river entered the obstruction, and cut off a whole loop to rejoin above. I suppose that with more time on our hands, and a bit of persistence and determination we should have stayed in the river and followed every inch of its course, but I had said to Terry that I wanted us to cover the whole 4.7Kms of Stillerus, and it later emerged that he needed to be somewhere by late afternoon, so we cut our cloth accordingly.
Stillerus section of Kamberg Nature Reserve has a resident population of reedbuck, blesbok, and wildebeest. Lone wildebeest have been known to be aggressive, and as I write this two members of a family were gored to death by a lone wildebeest while on a hike in the North Eastern Cape last year. As far as I know this is extremely rare. I have only ever seen a big group of wildebees off in the distance on Stillerus. The only time I ever felt threatened by a wildebeest was the time I was carrying a candle across the lawn at night on the way to the kids rondavel at Stillerus cottage in the late seventies, and one snorted behind me in the dark, causing me to drop the candle. But that turned out to be my father pulling a prank on me. Oh yes: There was that time we were charged by a lone bull in the berg. I was young. I climbed my Dad’s leg. That seemed to work.
At some point we stopped beside a pretty run, where a willow grew, for a cup of coffee and some eats. Sitting in the grass, beside the hissing stove, I happened to look up to the north, and in a brief moment a lammergeyer swooped low. I beckoned to Terry, who was on the phone at the time, but he missed it.
It was a pleasant morning out, with a gentle giant on a man who shares with me a soft spot for fly fishing, including all its “gear, tackle and trim”.
On our walk back in the warm afternoon sun, the subject of conversation turned to the politics in fly fishing circles. I said to Terry that I find is best to let ten or twenty years pass after you have met an apparently obnoxious fly fisherman, before you declare him an arsehole.
That evening I capitalized on the warmer weather, lit up a small fire and had a braai for one as the sun set behind the Giant, and the dabchicks chattered across the water to one another behind me.
When cooking my lamb chops on the fire, I again found myself wanting the salt and pepper that I had forgotten to pack, and which would have been good with my fried eggs too. I then went digging, because I knew I had an emergency plan for this occurrence, like many others. Sure enough I found a miniature vial of “Steers chip flavouring”. I had stored it in a bead container, and it was with my coffee making kit, for use on boiled eggs when having a streamside breakfast up some forgotten valley. I believe that all those little preparations, which include things like spare matches in watertight containers, extra superglue and spare laces, are all in fact part of a dream. It is a dream in which you, the outdoorsman, is out there, alone, on some mountain, or in a far flung cabin, and you are presented with a breakage or a problem. And being the Mc Guyver cross Bear Grylls that you are, you save the day with your miniature kit, stashed especially for such occasions. And if that miniature “save the day kit” remains buried in your fishing or hiking kit in the garage, then you are suppressing a part of your soul. If you never have need of that special kit, then you are not living your dream. My sabbatical was in some very small way, an attempt to live my sub-conscious dream. Having solved the problem of the forgotten salt, and having had a spare pair of long-johns, and a beanie stashed for unexpected snow, I sensed that I was living out the dream to some degree. That night my face and hands were as dry and chafed as sandpaper. I had not thought to bring moisturizing cream. I thought of rubbing the grease from the lamb chops all over my extremities, but decided I would be taking it too far. Bear Grylls could do that one. I checked my extra torch, made sure it too had spare batteries, and then I went to bed.
To read more from Andrew and to learn more about his book - Stippled Beauties please click HERE