Holiday time

The wife and myself are taking a bit of a short break and is spending some time in my home town of Mossel Bay in the Garden Route. I haven't done much fishing as I promised the wife that it would be "her" time so mostly we have been sitting on the balcony of our hotel or walking around town or on the beach. I am hoping for some fishing time later this afternoon, but we will see.

View of Mossel Bay from our balcony

Poppers

If you haven't seen the awesome poppers on the FLY FISHING AND TYING OBSESSED blog then check it out. If you are a regular reader of my blog then you will know that I mostly tie small flies for trout, but these poppers looked so cool that I had to tie myself a few.

These are not quite up to the same quality or standard but they sure are pretty.

The above two flies were tied on a #8 hook, and the below photo is just to compare them to the normal flies I tie.

Catching sharks on fly in South Africa

Check out this video of Jimmy "The shark Man" Eagleton catching a Ducked-billed Ray of Strand beach near Cape Town.




Korrie Broos also wrote a great article on Global Flyfisher about Jimmy's exploits which can be found HERE.

Brassie flies

Some Brassie flies that I am tying for an order.

Saterday outing

Things at work is still going crazy, but at least it seems to that things will slow down shortly. In the middle of all the work I did get a chance to fish last weekend with my fishing buddy Roland. We got on the water at about 07h30 and for the first time in a long while I actually had a shiver from the early morning cold. The water temperature had also seemed to have droped to a much cooler 14C.

Things started of slow with no rises and nothing taking a nibble on our nymphs. Eventually Roland hooked a beautiful brown trout and we were starting to hope for better things. The water in the river was still very low and we were fishing the shallow sections quite fast trying to get to some deeper pools higher up. Unfortunately as we got there we saw some kids swimming in the pools and they were throwing rocks all over the place. Our moods dropped a bit and we quickly walked around them.

In the first pool after the swimming kids I finally landed a beautiful brown trout. It amazes me how big these browns got in the last year as they were recent accidental releases in the river. They certainly seemed to have adapted in the river, though it remains to be seen if they will survive. Brown trout were introduced to the river decades ago,but only the rainbows have adapted and managed to flourish in the river.

We were off the water by about 11h00 as it was starting to heat up and the water temperature was also rising. At the end of the session we only landed two browns, two rainbows and a small mouth bass.

It was a pleasure to be out on the rivers again with some good company though.

Rigging up in the shadows of the mountain

Roland fish the tail end of a pool

Trout candy