Cape Mountain Stream

I’m off to Tasmania today but before catching my flight I wanted one more crack at a Cape stream and South African trout. In the meantime my mother and sister had moved down to the Cape and I was glad to be around to help them with the move which is always a stressful time. It means in my present transient state I get to call the Western Cape my symbolic “home”, the place where I will always have a bed, which suits me just fine - not only because it’s readily apparent that the province is clean and well run, or the unique beauty of the place, but also because of the quality of its trout fishing (to explore the next time I happen to be ‘home’). As an aside, the guy who handled our move said for every family his company moves out of the Western Cape, they move eight families down to the Cape. There is a real buzz about Cape Town right now (or is it more accurately a real disillusionment with the state of the other eight provinces?).

I contacted Darryl Lampert and swapped my screwdriver and handyman duties for a fly rod. Darryl took me to a little stream which tumbled down the fynbos slopes of a mountain range. It's an indescribably beautiful slip of honey coloured water, with tiny, ethereal rainbow trout clinging to life against the heat and fluctuating mountain conditions.


It’s the height of summer here so we made an early start when the air was still heavy with an early morning haze which filtered through tree branches like laser beams and blurred the peaks of the mountains. The strengthening sun soon melted away the shadows cast by the mountains and singed through the haze. Blessedly the wind changed from downstream to blow upstream. 



We took turns casting into the pocket water and pools but initially had no joy. Then I had a few rises to a black klinkhamer but I could see they were miniscule minnow-sized trout. Nevertheless I changed my fly to a much smaller hook but still couldn’t turn innocent interest into a firm hook-up. Matters took a positive turn when two visibly more substantial fish rose to Darryl’s dry fly in a flat pool. Both were missed (uncharacteristically from the little I have seen of Darryl fishing) but he hooked and netted the next in short time, third time lucky. The rainbow was about 9 inches long and a fish to be celebrated from this stream.


After a long interval of hard fishing, a space of perhaps four or five hours, I brought to hand my first fish, a rainbow trout a fraction longer than my thumb. Its home was a pool about the shape and depth of a large Jacuzzi and when I first saw it I boldly predicted I would catch a fish from it - the power of positive thinking you might say but then there are just some pools you recognise as bankers and this one paid off. The little trout came from the tail, and when we released it back into the water we spooked a much larger fish in the same pool which I estimated at 12 inches, a veritable giant. What could have been… I marked the spot for my next visit home, whenever that might be. Not to be outdone, Darryl cast downstream into the pool immediately below us and extracted another thumb-sized rainbow trout.

As time wore on into the early afternoon (I’d promised to have the car back by midday and I was thinking of excuses) I’d resigned myself to only the digit-long trout pitching up to my farewell party. But then I hooked and finally landed a trout to offer a fitting send off to Tasmania. It was a fish of about 8 inches, deceived by a #16 Royal Wulff. I now could finally bring myself to leave this secret little stream and with a slight spring in my step at that. Tasmania here I come!  

Darryl Lampert image

Comments

  1. Justin
    Awesome post!!---thanks for sharing

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    Replies
    1. Glad you enjoyed it Bill, thanks for the compliment.

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  2. Gorgeous! The stream and story that is, that orange fishing shirt is another matter 😉

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Nick. Great for contrast in photos, but not camouflage, the orange shirt didn't last very long...

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