
Date of Report: Wednesday, 22nd November 2023 |
Name: Andrew Fowler Email: truttablog@gmail.com Web: http://truttablog.com Phone: 082 574 4262 Bam, and suddenly its summer. Fiercely hot. Wild storms, and where on earth can I fish without getting roasted, washed away, or torched by lightning. I know….its my job to answer that…but I am struggling! You see a friend told me the Bushman’s was perilously low a few weeks back, and I didn’t pick up on his comment and went there anyway, and found it…..perfect. Saturday night, after a hot day, a few storms bumbled around half-heartedly and we got no rain down here. Sunday morning, I crossed the very upper uMngeni and it was getting a bit low. A few hundred meters away I crossed the Poort (a significant tributary) and it was roaring. Last Monday I was shivering on the river in a rain jacket with a down fleece under it, fishing in the drizzle in clean water. Yesterday I drove past that beat, and it was the colour of …hell …I don’t know…something Moroccan. Maybe a butter chicken with too much paprika in it. Not exactly something that inspires visions of wild brown Trout is it! What I will say is that the water is suddenly perilously warm. I shook my thermometer several times yesterday because it was lying like a cheap watch. I mean it wasn’t 24 degrees at 1600 metres altitude was it? Surely not! The change of season from a spring which delivered a jumble of hot AND cool days suddenly seems behind us. So I can regale you with tales of the 8 pound stillwater brown I saw last week on someone’s phone screen, or the 15 incher I got under the poplars, or the 18 incher that took a P.O.S. Beetle just 8 days back, but somehow it seems irrelevant now. A few bullets points though:
Like I said: I’m struggling. Krantz pool on the Mooi |