BARKLY OCTOBER 2012 PART 1

BARKLY OCTOBER 2012 PART 1

Sunday, 14 October 2012 15:15

TRIP TO BARKLY EAST – OCTOBER 2012 – PART ONE

Sterkspruit BW

Text and pictures Tom Sutcliffe

This was going to be one of the trips to the Eastern Cape Highlands where I’d get things right, at least as far as conditions go. I’d been calling a local guide, Tony Kietzman, and Basie Vosloo, owner of Birkhall farm where I was due to stay, for weeks, so I knew what lay ahead – more or less perfect rivers, fat fish and a week when those well known Norwegian weather forecasters were predicting good weather other than for high winds and the odd day of light rain.

Panorama near Melsetter

I enjoyed the long horizons and silence of the Karoo, swung left at Beaufort West onto the seemingly endless 150 kilometres of highway to Aberdeen, a lonely road where seeing another car is like spotting a rare bird in your back yard.

Crows nest Steynsberg

The telephone poles were taken down along this route some years back so now there are fewer nesting sites for crows, Pale Chanting Goshawks and the like, though I did find one crow nesting on top of a road sign saying ‘High Accident Zone’, suggesting crows don’t read that well, couldn’t be bothered or understand the close proximity to road kills can't be a bad thing.

Stream on Millard Karoo

I spent the night at Mike and Candy Ferrar’s place, Mount Melsetter, 40 kilometres out of Middelberg. I stay here nearly every trip i make to Rhodes because I know the Ferrar’s well enough to feel at home in their lodge and I enjoy the farm. Besides, I’m pretty road burned and in need of a cold beer by the time I’m abeam their place around 5.00 in the afternoon. We normally walk the dry river bed looking for fossils, but for the last 20 months the stream, which runs just off their front porch by the way, has flowed continuously. The water is clear and cold and deep and I wondered about fish travelling up, but spotted none. Birds there were though aplenty, including a nesting pair of Black-winged Stilts that I managed to find and photograph.

The following day I was on Birkhall.

Sterspruit River panorama

On day one I fished again with my friend Brian Hammond who came across to Birkhall with Tony Kietzman. We fished the Sterkspruit below Birkhall. The river was running well, softly green-coloured with depth and inviting-looking. At first the fish rose to the dry fly, but tentatively enough not to get hooked. For a long while we saw nothing more, but then suddenly they started to swing at nymphs and we took a few fish up to 14 inches that were deep and fat and jumped like cats.

Hook up in a Sterkspruit run

We were using 3 and 4 weight rods, mine on the day a bamboo stick made by Steve Dugmore that cast so evenly and precisely it gave me the feeling I couldn’t mess up a presentation without making some sort of written application.

Sterkspruit rainbow in hand

 In one run I hooked and landed four rainbows up to 15 inches, called Brian over and watched him land another four working his nymph up to the riffled white water at the throat of the run. I was fishing a Zak tied on a size 16 grub hook with an orange tungsten bead, using that short line-upstream-dead drift nymphing technique that depends on your reacting quickly to the slightest shiver in the indicator. And for the most that’s all we got – the slightest shiver, or a fraction of a second’s delay, or just a minor deviation in the path of the drift. Sometimes the takes are bolder and unmistakable with this kind of nymphing, but this time they were subtle and cryptic. So we missed a lot of fish until we got the hang of it enough to get sharper about concentrating on the drift, taking up slack line, fishing shorter and putting the nymph through the white water at the head of runs with just as much care as we fished the choice bits. Plenty of trout were sitting up in the fast water.

Hot spot Zak

# 16 Zak tied on a barbless grub hook

I know the dry fly cuts it best for most anglers, but testy nymphing isn’t exactly a city block behind the dry fly for fun. One of the secrets is to keep your casts short and your drift drag free. When we induced movement we invariably got smaller trout than when the drift was pure. I've noticed this over the years. Also I've noticed that the sharper and more pronounced the take, the smaller the fish; the more subtle and gentle the take, the bigger the fish. Rule of thumb, but it works.

Another fly that did well that day was MC Coetzer’s CDC and Squirrel Nymph , a gold bead fly with a bright orange wing case (See below and in the picture of the trout above).

Sterkspruit rainbow taken on a CDC and Squirrel nymph

Just as an aside, you will notice the Ghost net in the picture above, with its soft, rubbery, semi-translucent mesh. I like them more and more for three main reasons. The first, and undoubtedly the most important, is that they lessen any risk of corneal abrasion to the trout’s eyes. The second is that they are very photogenic and the final reason is that your fly – and other stuff – snags far less in them. A number of net manufacturers offer Ghost nets, including Brodin in the USA, and Mario Geldenhuys, a brilliant local craftsman, says he will be doing all he can to offer ghosts nets to his clients in the near future. And that’s after only a couple of days fishing with me up in Barkly when I used nothing else but these nets.

The hen fish were silvery; the cocks more copper coloured and more discretely spotted, not unlike cutthroats and just as pretty.

Stomach content

I gently checked two trout with my stomach pump and found they were eating tiny Baetid nymphs, about size 18’s, and then not many. The contents were sparse. There were also odd scraps of green slime suggesting they were feeding right on the bottom.

Deep-sided Sterkspruit rainbow

In the afternoon we moved upstream and got a few better-sized fish, including one of 16 inches, from a stretch on this farm I put a lot of store by.

It was a great day, slow-paced and testy, but rewarding enough in all the ways that count.

Brian Hammond on the Sterkspruit

The following day was clouded over and windy. After a brief run up a short section of the Sterkspruit, which netted me four bright rainbows, I drove across to Rhodes. At the bridge over the Bokspruit the water was low and sparkling clear. I watched trout rising in the riffle seam in the top half of the run above the bridge. From their splashy rises they seemed small fish and you just knew if you slipped a Parachute RAB over them you’d be in for some fun.

The Bokspruit above the bridge

Later I had a beer with Dave Walker on the veranda of Walkerbouts Inn and then an early dinner with Michelle and Roger Welsh, both respected doctors in the district who live just outside town. I spent the night at Tony’s place in Rhodes talking fishing, bamboo rods and cameras until we ran out of sensible things to say to one another. He’s a great enthusiast, a pleasant person to share a stream with and although we’re just good friends, he happens to be a guide, so happily he still can’t fight back the impulse to go fetch my flies out of branches!

Tony Kietzman in his Rhodes cottage

Next day I fished the Sterkspruit with two youngsters, Johann du Preez and Joubert Coetzer, who were visiting the area from Bloemfontein. They are both good anglers, but needed help controlling slack line and reading nymph indicators. It was a day the wind blew so strongly there were no hatches and judging from the water marks along the sandy sections of river bank the water level was dropping rapidly through evaporation.

 

Joubert Coetzer

It was a slow day when the fish were hiding, but late in the afternoon the wind softened and a pretty charcoal-spotted mayfly spinner landed on Johann’s fly vest. We saw the first few tentative rises after that and even took a fish or two on a dry fly.

Sterkspruit spinner

Days when the fishing is slow are not hard to fathom out. We put it down to an approaching cold front, and if no front happens to turn up, we put it down to the intermittent obstinacy that characterises trout often enough to provide a reasonable explanation for anything out of the ordinary.

It was the end of day three of the trip and already I was feeling the sticky residue of city life sliding off me.

Sterkspruit under lovely clouds

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