I might have just been lucky but I can’t remember a dog that was a nuisance around a fly stream. In fact the reverse. Mainly they’ve been great companions, good fun, always entertaining and seemed to have enjoyed the fishing as much as we did, in their own ways of course. so i decided to add a medley of pictures I have taken over the years where dogs feature in the fly fishing. You don't have to read all my thoughts on dogs and rivers though; just scroll down to the pictures at the end of the page, click in an image to enlarge it and follow the arrows to the next picture.

Years back I fished a lot with was Basie Vosloo’s liver and white English pointer. His name was Archer and on the first trip we did to the lower Sterkspruit he was all over the runs and then at the end of the day got lost. It’s a long story and an episode I mention in my book Hunting Trout. After that his manners around the water improved. You will see him in a few of these images, the most difficult one to spot him in being the picture where Phil Hills is standing on a tall bank looking down on the inviting vista a perfectly flowing Bokspruit. Look carefully in the far distance and you should spot him on the left bank. He’s also the dog in the picture of Basie in his green F 100 truck the one I drew Adams dry flies on. Arch is sitting at the back. The pointer in Basie’s lap is Feathers, Archer's mother and also a good stream dog.

Naturally the dogs I have got to know best are the ones on Birkhall, simply because I’ve stayed there so often over the years on fishing trips to the Eastern Cape Highlands. Mainly when I’m visiting up there the weather is on the cold side. At sunrise the dogs climb up onto the roof above the shed to bask in the morning sun like rock rabbits and at night they crawl into a tangled nest of dogs that jostle for the best place in the kitchen to soak up the warmth from the Aga stove.

Some of the happiest fishing dogs I ever saw are the ones that ran with the horses the times we go to fish the summit of the Drakensberg on horseback. They never stop running ahead of the horses and then back down to us again so by the time we get to the source of the Bokspruit at close on 10 000 ft I reckon they've covered twice the distance – and at full speed.

Then there’s Billy de Jong’s dog Mally, a game for anything Jack Russell. She took to fishing from back when she was a puppy and she’s now got more river miles under her paws than any dog I know. And she rides a float tube like she was in command of it. She behaves herself around water and has a feeling for fishing in as much as she realises you cast a fly, the fly drifts and a fish takes it, or not. Only once did she slip up. It was when we were on the lower Bokspruit and having a lean time of it in low water when she took a flying leap off the bank and landed plumb in the centre of the best run we’d seen all day.

But I still stand by what I said at the start. I never met a fishing dog that was anything like a pain on an outing; just the opposite. Now I’ve gone and got myself a puppy, a Jack Russell. We called her Polly and I’m just about ready to introduce her to her first fly stream.

Tom Sutcliffe