This was one of the streams Ed Herbst and I didn’t appreciate as much as we should have when we first fished it, but then it was way back when we were new to the Maclear district in the southern Drakensberg where small streams are that plentiful its natural enough not to get too carried away by just one of them. There are near on a dozen in this area and even now I’d guess there are still more streams I haven’t fished than streams I have.

On our many visits up there Ed and I always stopped at the tiny stone bridge that carries the gravel road over the tiny upper reaches of a stream called the Swith where it flows at the foot of the eastern side of the Naude’s Nek pass in the southern Drakensberg.

Click in images to enlarge

Here’s the stream at the bridge

We saw trout around the bridge; dark-backed, panicky fish that shot into shadows as soon as we stuck our heads over the parapets. Of course we wondered if they’d take a fly, which always ended up in one of those long, uncomfortable ethical debates you have with yourself when you feel tempted to fish private water that is clearly off limits but happens to be conveniently remote and totally uninhabited. 

Then on one of our trips we eventually surrendered to our curiosity, set up a rod and hooked a couple of trout either side of the bridge. They were pretty trout, not any bigger than you’d expect from a stream this small, which in our book made them nice-sized fish.

Donie Naude , a salt-of -the-earth mountain man, on the banks of the Swith

A year later when we were staying at Vrederus with Donie and Juan-Marie Naude, Donie arranged that we fish this section with the proper authority – meaning without having to sink to poaching. It was a bright morning, we had time on our hands, plenty of newly tied dry flies and the trout seemed mad keen to eat.

We fished upstream of the bridge until the stream dwindled into a series of barren pools trickling into one another over sheets of solid bedrock.

Until the stream just dwindled

The better water was the kilometre or so below the bridge where it flowed in gently sloping grasslands lined with box willows and Ouhout, a shrub with pale grey-green, fluffy leaves and brittle black branches that always speak to the nearness of trout.

Ouhout

For some reason the fish in this part of the stream had an amber, almost copper-coloured tint and I briefly convinced Ed they must be a distant strain of cutthroats. He’d had never caught a cutthroat, but many years back I’d got half a dozen in the Yellowstone River in Montana and in a strange way the trout in the upper Swith seemed to revive memories of my Yellowstone trip, though I might have just been romanticising a little, something it’s easy to do on a stream that’s new to you, delightful and far enough removed to feel like it’s on the outer edge of the world.

I semi convinced Ed this was a cutthroat strain

But by the time we’d caught a dozen of these trout I had to agree they weren’t cutthroats at all; just a copper-coloured, local strain of free–rising, high altitude rainbows characterised more by an inclination to throw themselves recklessly at dry flies than any passing resemblance to cutthroats.

Ed latches into yet another fish.

We left that afternoon not near to realising just what a great day’s fishing  we’d had, but that’s the kind of truth that often only strikes you years later when you’ve fished a heap more streams that were much less attractive and caught half as many trout in them that were nowhere near as pretty. The fishing was good enough to never forget, but not good enough to cloud out the memory of snapping the last few inches off the tip of my 2-weight fly rod as I was climbing through the fence on our way out.

A year later Donie arranged that we fish the lower section of the Swith on John Jordaan’s farm, Honingkloof, where it’s naturally bigger and runs through a spectacularly rugged ravine.

Ravine country

In fact it’s a tossup whether the fishing here is more special than the scenery and it’s good when you can say that about a place. Again I was with Ed and we had a long, pleasant day lazily drifting dry flies over lively little trout. I think that’s when the place first started to grow on me in that pleasant way that some streams find a place in your heart that you know is going to be there for as long as they stay the same and don’t fall prey to some crooked property developer out to improve his bank account.

Lower down the valley the Swith trout aren’t as coppery, but they’re pretty fish all the same, and in the best sense of the word they are wild and just as free-rising as their upstream neighbours, so you’d have to dream up a good excuse to plunk nymphs at them rather than to fish size 16 dry flies on 7X tippets, preferably on a bamboo rod if only just to keep faith with – or maybe add to – the perfect naturalness of the place.  

Lower Swith trout

Lower down the Swith joins the Luzie around about where the Bradgate stream joins in, but I’m guessing now. And in the next valley down towards Maclear there’s the Hawerspruit and the Antelope stream that are all as good as the Swith at producing free-rising rainbows, but to my mind nowhere near as pretty.

Ed Herbst on the Luzie

and on the Bradgate, above and below

The Hawerspruit, above and below

The Antelope stream, above

If there’s a downside to fishing the Swith it’s maybe that some days it’s too easy. Okay, I’ve been in this valley when the fishing was tough, but not often, and mainly because it had rained for days, or else it hadn’t rained in months.

The Swith in low flow

And I’ve been colder here than I ever remember when the fish naturally will have gone moody, and then on rare days, it’s been hot enough to take a swim when the fish will have gone equally moody if only for a different reason, but overall there’s been a predictable constancy to the place on the matters that we think count – like plenty of naive fish, dependable dry fly fishing, landscapes that change enough around every corner to keep you mildly amazed. And there’s always an opiate-like sense of deep-country remoteness and solitude on Honingkloof that you can end up wondering if you’re actually out fishing or just hanging around a river meditating

And notice I haven’t used the words ‘big trout’ once in this piece. It’s the sort of stream you don’t miss catching big fish. And there’s a fascinating inverse macho logic in that, I know, a sort of fringe gonzo-type adherence to the joys of minimalism that most small stream trout fishers don’t always find easy to explain, or else we don’t want to because we actually don’t understand it fully ourselves. But after I’ve fished the Swith and caught a couple of nice trout, and maybe one or two big 12 inch fish, I never recall suffering any angst about not hooking a 16 incher. I haven’t fished the river often enough though to quite swear there aren’t any around; but for some reason I believe there probably aren’t, and it doesn’t matter.

But wanting to catch big fish in high-altitude mountain streams misses a lot about what we like most about fishing them in the first place; meaning these streams are more about where you are at the time, how light you’re fishing, how intimate they are, how pretty they are, than how big the trout in them happen to get. It's a state that has much of the joy of solitude and remoteness about it, nevermind the pure pleasure of plain unpretentious fly fishing.

The Swith in perfect nick

Just the other day I had one of those crazy trips where you get up at 4:00 to be at the airport at 5:00 to take the 6:00 am flight from Cape Town to Johannesburg, then find yourself back at the airport at 7:00 that night waiting for the flight that will get you home around 10:00, exhausted and bad-tempered. Modern airports must represent all the worst aspects of crowds and deadlines and all that’s good in the peace and tranquillity of mountain streams. I guess in that way they might play an important role in our lives. Look, it just doesn't get any worse in the our modern world than big airports and shopping malls, so count your blessings for the fast dwindling, far off places of solitude you still know of and can reach without the help of self-opening doors and escalators.

Taking a Swith trout in the rain

Now that I come to think of it, fly fishing can be as much about what you’re doing as what you're escaping.

Tom Sutcliffe