IMPRESSIONS FROM THE MARCH 2011 WILD TROUT ASSOCIATION FESTIVAL IN RHODES
From what we were hearing the rivers around the village of Rhodes in the southern Drakensberg were high and dirty for this year’s Wild Trout Festival, though the headwaters were reported to be ‘clear and fishable’. I had a good mental image of some of the stretches they were fishing because I know them well enough in most weather, but I didn’t expect anything quite like I saw in the pictures I was sent. ‘Clear but drownable’ might have been a better way of describing things, though people did catch trout, not heaps, but enough to neutralise the downside of getting totally skunked and keep the folk who attended happy.
Then again staying in Rhodes you need to make written application to the Department of Home Affairs not to be happy, whatever the weather, however the fishing. It’s a cosy village filled with atmosphere of itself, not entirely sleepy, but then not wide-eyed awake either, the sort of place you feel you’ve escaped to rather than arrived in.
The surrounding countryside is threaded with trout streams, a few hundred kilometres of them – I think as many as 700 ks in 13 different rivers, but don’t hold me to that exactly because it could turn out to be a few hundred more. In a good season I rate this huge area right up there with the best places I have ever fished – like Montana, South Island New Zealand, the Skeena River system, Iceland, the chalkstreams of Wiltshire – only the scenery is more spectacular. And Yes, I know I’m a radical convert and sing the praises of the district on any chance I get, but then so do most of the other converts I know who have discovered it, and its fishing, and have never fully recovered.
I got pictures of the festival via Sharland Urquhart who lives in Cape Town and described her day at Gateshead as ‘Heaven sent and full of fat rainbows’ and from Jan Korrubel and Peter Brigg who live in KZN. See if you can catch the atmosphere of this slice of the planet, what I mean by ‘drownable’ rivers as opposed to fishable, and what I mean by ‘spectacular scenery’.
FROM SHARLAND URQUHART
Sharland Urquhart and Peter Brigg at the entrance to Gateshead
FROM JAN KORRUBEL
Cottage in Rhodes
Compare the picture below taken at roughly the same spot in normal flows - Tom Sutcliffe
Sunrise in Rhodes
The final crossing to Gateshead farm - pedestrians only!
AND FINALLY, FROM PETE BRIGG
And the picture that says it all...!
