Camping and fishing

Firstly I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and had the opportunity to spend some quality time with family and friends. The reason for my late Christmas wishes is that I did get to spend to quality time with my family as well as managed to get some good Bass fishing in at the same time.

We packed up the dogs and the tent on Friday afternoon and drove about 2 hours to a  farm next to the Breede river to spend the weekend. We arrived a little bit late on Friday afternoon and after pitching the tents we cracked some beers and sat around the fire talking nonsense.

Our happy camp

Saturday morning I was up early and after kissing the wife and wishing her a happy Christmas I was on the float tube and ready to catch me some bass.I managed a few small ones before the devil of all winds came up and blew down some branches of the trees. It was no fun in the float tube and I headed for shore to a delicious bacon and egg breakfast. The rest of the day was spend lying on the grass drinking beers and Margaritas.

Sunday morning I was up early again and after float tubing around a bit I hitched a lift with my brother in law in the row boat down to some rapids. I got another couple of small fish and landed some more on the slow paddle back up to camp again.

I didn't fish to much the weekend and also did not catch any monsters but there are definitely some big fish around. A few of them cruised around under my float tube, but ignored my flies completely.

We are back at home now a little bit sun burned and tired, but it was a fun weekend away, and I will definitely return to get some of those big ones.

A new look

YES, you are at the correct place, do not click that back button just yet.

I have made some changes to the look of my blog. Firstly a new title image. The fly I drew myself with some inspiration from A Year On The Fly. Secondly the background of the blog. It is a bit of a change from the black background I had before.

I am not yet convinced that it is for the better as there is something not quite right, so I will be doing some tweaking in the next few days and might just go back to the original look. I do like the look of the title image though.

Let me know what you think, good or bad.

This is another title image that I had in mind

A great day's fishing on a cool mountain stream

Yesterday was my last day of leave and I celebrated it by spending the morning on a cold mountain stream. I rigged up a dry and dropper system with a CDC and Elk hair Caddis and a #18 Hot spot Pheasant tail variant nymph. I started fishing at about 7am and till about 9am all the fish took the nymph.

Pheasant tail variant

Shortly after 9am a fish took the dry followed by another smallish rainbow shortly after. I took off the nymph and tied on a dry fly spider pattern and from then on all the fish came up confidently to the dry fly.

The most memorable fish was the brown below that shot out from under a bush and launched himself a meter out of the water smashing my fly.He also gave me the best fight I have ever had for a brown trout.

I lost another good brown later in the morning but all the rest of the fish were Rainbows ranging from about 8 to 16 inches. Normally the fish in this particular stream would be in the fast water but today they were sitting in the slow flowing pools which made it a interesting exercise casting to them and not spooking them. There were six fish rising occasionally in the pool below and I managed to fool 4 of them into taking my dry. The other two I spooked with sloppy presentation. I also had to put lots of pressure on every fish when it took the dry to prevent him from screaming of upstream to spook the next fish.

Normally at this time of the year the water levels are pretty low and the water temperature heats up quite quickly, but at the moment the streams are just perfect, the fish are in great condition and its a absolute pleasure just being out on the rivers. I spend a great deal of the morning just sitting on a rock with my feet in the cool mountain water contemplating life.

If Douglas Adams was a fly fisher I am pretty sure he would have come up with a different answer than 42.

Well Monday its back to the daily grind. On a more hopefull note: The Lotto tonight is R15 mil, I have a ticket in my pocket and with the right amount of luck I would be able to spend lots more time sitting on a rock getting the correct answer to the meaning of life  for all of you.

Rainbow trout from a small stream

I finally had some spare time to get on the rivers today. I left home early and arrived at the water a short while later. It was a beautiful summers day with not a breath of wind here in Cape Town, but being mindful of the expected hot temperatures later in the day I got onto the water fast.

The second cast in the first pool had a small rainbow slashing at my fly, but unfortunately I missed it. The next pool produced another little rainbow and that was an indication of things to come. I only fished for a few hours and skipped a lot of water but I had about 15 rainbow landed at the end of the day. What was also great to see was all the really small rainbow trout that was slashing at my fly. These bugger actually became quite annoying after a while as they were gunning for my fly in almost every pool, but were to small to actually take the size 16 parachute spider pattern I had on. As soon as I got a good drift on my fly they would slash at the fly and knock it over before the dry could get to the bigger fish that I spotted in the pool, but as mentioned above it was good to see that the river is very healthy and that there is a good amount of small fish in the river.

As the temperature started heating up the fish also got scarcer and I decided to rather pack it up.

Fish Skull Flies

Another quick fly using Fish Skull heads.

A day at the beach and some flies

I was hoping to have plenty of photos of Sand sharks for this post, but sadly it was not meant to be. We headed out early Saturday morning to hunt these fish and after stopping over for a delicious bacon and egg breakfast while waiting for the tide to rise we hit the water. These sharks are best targeted by casting to sighted fish, but due to the strong wind on the day it made it difficult to spot any fish due to the chop on the water.

My fishing buddy and myself only had about two hours to spend in the water and during this time we did not see anything. I heard from the other guys that was also there that they managed a few later in the afternoon. It was still a fun day learning some new tricks and after three weeks of no fishing it was refreshing to be out again, and in the word of my favorite Terminator "I'll be back"

Searching the flats

The windy day was more suited for these guys, or in this case , girls

On the tying front I have been playing with some Fish Skull's that I received recently . I am looking forward to giving these guys a test drive soon.

 The dry look

The wet look

A two tone bunny

On a positive note I will be on a weeks leave in 7 days time, so hope to have some more fishing time soon.

A few salty flies

Its been a slow week on the fishing front and a busy week at work. With Christmas looming and everyone scrambling for presents it seem that all I get time  for a night is to fill up orders.

I do have a salt water trip planned for Saturday and managed to start tying some flies or the (hopefully) Sand Sharks that we will be targeting.

Four flies is however not going to get me very far, so hopefully I will be able to add some more to my non- existent  Salt water flybox in the next two days.