THE TIPPET - NUMBER 76 - April 2025

"ON THE LINE" - EDITORIAL FROM THE FOSAF CHAIR - ILAN LAX

It is hard to believe that the year has started and then pressed on so rapidly. January and February are long gone. March has now also just past, and April is already well on the way. Pretty soon the deciduous trees will start to turn and the grass will start to assume it's wintry khaki hue. For now, we are in that time of year where temperatures are reasonably bearable and the late summer rains feel interminable. I know its churlish to bemoan the amount of rain we have had over the last while and that other parts of the country and the region are drought stricken. But here in Piemburg, my friend's leather couch can't help smelling of mildew and my other driven pastime of chasing down a little black ball and attempting to place it where my opponent isn't, is made all the more taxing and sometimes even unpleasant, by the overbearing humidity we have to endure. Now I finally understand (you'd have thought I would have gotten there twenty years ago!!) why the "winter squash league" like some of the best flyfishing, takes place in the cooler months.

If you are anything like me, your inbox gets inundated with a plethora of uninvited emails. Some are downright rude or unpleasant or threatening. You can't imagine how many times I have been encouraged to pay for undelivered items that I never ordered or I been informed that I am the lucky winner of some random lottery I never bought a ticket for! But among all of that spam and junk mail, I recently received an email from another international flyfishing publication called Hatch Magazine. What a pleasant and serendipitous surprise. This is a quality publication with some excellent writers and articles, almost as good as, but with a different vibe, to our gem of a Fly Mag - The Mission produced by Tudor Caradoc-Davies and his merry team. We are truly blessed to have access (electronic and hard copy) to such a wide selection of flyfishing magazines, journals and publications both locally and internationally.

For those of you who have not visited our website recently, you should now find navigating through it a whole lot easier. Thanks to our webmaster Andrew Vester and our trusty stalwart Peter Arderne, we have revised the layout and the menus to make them a lot more user friendly. This will e.g. help you to find the current and past reports for the various regions and across the different fresh and salt waters we cover.Our appreciation and thanks go to Peter and his dedicated band of regional reporters across the country for compiling these amazing resources, that FOSAF is able to offer you all.

As we have reported previously, the former Minister set up a Trout Task Team (after FOSAF and AquaSA opposed the 2020 AIS Regulations) with the specific job of finding practical solutions to resolve the listing of trout. While very slow progress had been made due to long delays and Covid, since then, some useful meetings allowed for us to discuss practical approaches based on self-administration with mandatory reporting and scrutiny. This meant we were able to offer some solution options that are cost-effective and simpler. We remain hopeful that the pragmatic solution based on the detailed maps agreed to by all stakeholders, including the DFFE and the provinces, in the extensive mapping process that took place from 2015 to 2017 will carry the day and find acceptance.

We are grateful to all those people and entities that provided the funding to FOSAF and TSA which enabled us to record the data for the original extensive mapping process. This was vital because having kept this data safe and backed up, meant it was available to be shared with the authorities when required like happened recently. We must mention Richard Viljoen, who was encouraged and pushed by the late Gerrie van der Merwe to serve as our GIS expert and who was responsible for recording and securing this vital data for FOSAF and TSA. I am extremely grateful we took this precaution which proved itself in the light of subsequent events.

Another area where FOSAF has been active relates to Wild Capture Freshwater Fisheries Policy implementation planning process that the DFFE are workshopping with a range of stakeholder groups, including, small scale anglers, recreational anglers, fisheries scientists, provincial conservation agencies and the like. We have attempted to ensure that practical solutions are found that on the one hand incentivise good practice and sustainability of what is recognised as a vulnerable resource but which at the same time recognises that South Africa has massive inequality and one of the worst Gini coefficients in the world and that the lack of opportunities and decent livelihoods will drive many to criminal options offering short term gains at the expense of our future needs. We have been able to begin to build a coalition of interested parties with a view to de-escalating some of the heavy handed command control approaches (we hope for some kind of a moratorium while better legislation is crafted) with the intention to encouraging buy-in for sustainable options. Yes I know the road to hell ..., but if we don't have a go at trying to find better alternatives, we are definitely heading for serious problems.

We will keep you posted on these and other important issues facing our fisheries.

In recent times we have lost some luminaries in the flyfishing world. I was privileged to speak at Dr Tom Sutcliffe's memorial service together with Stephen Boshoff, Dr Fareed Abdullah and family members. While Tom was a founding member and a former chairperson and President of FOSAF, he was so much more than just a remarkable flyfishing exponent. A family man, a doctor, a writer, an artist and a superb administrator and strategist, as well as a friend to many. We have recently also heard of the passing of Stuart Tough who together with his wife Liz formed our Secretariat for many many years and carried a huge burden keeping FOSAF on the straight and narrow. We send warm condolences to Liz and the Tough family.

On the international stage I recently read about the passing of the great flyfisher and writer John Gierach who wrote so many good books and articles. See the wonderful article by David Gallipoli at https://midcurrent.com/stories-essays/rest-the-water-remembering-john-gierach/.

As I have said before, it is my firm belief that all anglers are by nature optimistic and hopeful. Why else would we head off to a water body or stream rod in hand, often at some cost whether in money or time or both, if we did not trust that the universe would deliver up a fishing opportunity or better still a fish or two or three! We flyfishers invest in our pastime and it puzzles me that so few see the value we as FOSAF contribute for the general good. Maybe we are bad at our marketing and communication. I can tell you that we have tried to take the advice of so many fundis in these matters, to little avail. While I must concede that I am hopeless at social media, other of our ilk are pretty adept at it.

So in this vein I urge you to share your thoughts on why you may have decided to stop paying your subscription to FOSAF or why you think others prefer not to join us despite what we do for the greater good of flyfishing. I would really value hearing from anyone of you out there.

FOSAF is mindful of the escalating costs and have decided not to increase our subscriptions which remain at R30 a month or R360 per annum. I again hope I have given you just a few examples and reasons why you may want to support our achievements by joining or re-joining us as full members and stay with us as we tackle the many issues facing us as flyfishers.

I wish you all a wonderful autumn's fishing!

Yours on the Line - Ilan Lax - FOSAF Chairman.

Saving Sandfish: Project Update March 2025

The Clanwilliam sandfish is South Africa's most threatened migratory freshwater fish. Once widespread throughout the Olifants-Doring River system in the Western Cape, it has disappeared from the Olifants Catchment, and numbers in the Doring-SA's last large, wild, undammed river-and its tributaries are in sharp decline leading to its Endangered IUCN status.

To prevent sandfish extinction, the Freshwater Research Centre and partners (including the FOSAF) launched the Saving Sandfish project in 2020, which has undertaken South Africa's largest freshwater fish rescue and reintroduction programme on record. A recent scientific paper published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice reveals that this approach is slowly but surely rebuilding the depleted wild sandfish population.

Teams of scientists, farmers and local community members have collectively rescued and relocated over 35,000 juvenile sandfish from the Biedouw River-where their chances of survival are slim-to six farm dams, which were cleared of non-native fish to create sandfish sanctuaries.

Once these fish reach a 'bass-proof' size of 15 cm, they are released back into the wild with tiny PIT tags which allow scientists to track their movements and survival. Nearly 3,000 bass-proof sandfish have been released, and results to date show a nearly 20 % return rate, tripling of the size of the Biedouw spawning population - a significant step towards securing the long-term survival of the species.

Find out more about the Saving Sandfish project and other freshwater fish conservation projects via the Freshwater Research Centre's Website:

Our special thanks to Wolf Avni for making this story available for use in the Tippet.

BITCH-CREEK NYMPHING & THE MILLENNIUM BUG
"It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout stream."
George Elliot, Middlemarch 1871

And so it came to be that long years after shaking the dust of academia from the by-then well worn heels of my sneakers, my first-born, Sean, in his final year at a reputable school in Grahamstown, demanded my presence at a formal dinner in his dormitory. So as not to unduly embarrass the boy - or disgrace those hallowed halls - I went out and bought what I thought to be appropriate dress. Properly advised by a bespoke tailor to many generations of well-bred toffee-nosed snot-arses, I found myself the bemused owner of a charcoal single-breasted day suit and a pair of finely stitched black Italian leathers. They fitted like a dream, but would be useless in a river or on any mountain slope. The soles just did not have any grip.

Sean, unused to seeing me so attired and not expecting it, looked straight through me, at first with not a shred of recognition - and it began to dawn upon me that I was in for a jammed-sandwich dead-lined weekend. "Hey Pa? Is that you? What happened? You look like a hippy in a hired wedding suit. Did you get robbed or something?" I explained the purity of my impulsion. He grimaced. "It's sweet of you, but you should have stuck to jeans, you might have looked less like a horse's ass", he confided gently. I loved that boy and like Abraham, could happily have sacrificed him.

The expedition was not entirely a debacle. For brief moments, I basked in the glory of my boy's academic accolades and sound socialisation, but - more to the point - I got to stop over along the Hogsback on my way home. If I recall rightly, in the sweet-scented pines with my bespoke trousers wound up around my bespoke knees, I spent long moments rolling casts over a chuckling stream, catching a half dozen firm-fleshed, tiny rainbows and gathering a punnet of perfect little cep (boletus edulis) buttons from beneath the forest carpet. What a breakfast they made - seared in a skillet of bacon and butter on an open fire. The Hogsback, not unlike these hills where I now live, enfolds often in a skirl of swirling mist, which softens the light until the landscape turns as grey and granular as a newsprint photograph. Time itself becomes just another velvet-soft midrange tonal shade. It is a fine backdrop for a breakfast, and though the memory is now more than thirty years distant, in the mind's eye I still savour the bouquet of that mess of mushrooms, crisped fingerlings, and musty pine.

It all seems so far away, now that the circus-blare of modern media marketing has swept up fly-fishing and its once-hidden valleys, its crystal streams and the still, deep waters where wild fish fin. The spotlight glare has entirely passed by the Hogsback and its trout, and they are today as reclusive as they ever were. In fact, I doubt if there are many modern fishermen around who even know of their existence - and that makes them pure in a way that the monster fish adorning the glossy pages of fishing magazines never can be.

You will guess perhaps that back then I was at heart a romantic and, as such, not of much use in real relationships or their servicing. Nevertheless, with Sean it was different and I took him fishing often. Not that it did him any good. The little ingrate has, with scant appreciation for the many hours we spent together at waters' edge, grown to contemn things piscine.

His aversion was never for the water itself. He has to the contrary given every appearance of a fondness for the stuff. He will, for instance, lie for hours on a surfboard beyond shark-infested reefs with the waves crashing down around him. He will swim in it, dive in it, and - too often for his own good - grunt and shove the afternoon away with a dozen testosterone-riven jocks in some polo pool. At the drop of a hat he will sail single handed in any flimsy craft across great oceans of endless water. Far latitudes and the treachery of their currents hold no peril for him. He will raft for days on end down raging torrents; the Zambezi, the Orange. Even in full spate, they are too tame for him. Given half an opportunity and the right kind of moon, he would, no doubt - like any healthy young animal - in the course of a summer midnight swim, allow himself to be shamelessly seduced by veritable gaggles of young maidens - and think no more of it than as bitch-creek nymphing.

Yup, he likes water and has a keen appreciation for all things natural, as long as they are bereft of any angling inference or instrument.

This aberration of his, specific as it is to fishing, betrays an unhealthy pessimism at his core. Any angler, no matter how depressive he might be in the rest of his affairs is naturally and unerringly an optimist when on the water. Every tug and snag felt in the line is transformed by the mind - if only for a second - into a leviathan of a fish, a moment of pure joy. Every weed, every branch, all flotsam and jetsam - whatsoever might brush one's line - galvanises the true angler in a way that is instinctive and primordial. But with my boy it is different. Once we went fishing to Sterkfontein Dam. There, with a good four-pound rainbow trout cavorting at the end of his line, he proved for all time that he is afflicted with a whole string of regressive genes. "It's probably a plastic shopping bag," he said languidly with his hands in his pockets while his rod juddered and bucked all over the boat's transom. "It's a fish, you freaking weirdo," I told him with stern paternalism. "Nah, I never catch anything", he reminded me.

Youth is wasted on him. While filled with his full due of boundless energy, of passion and of dreaming, he has not the patience that distance brings, and without which there can be no fishing. While he is happy enough to accompany me on my outings into God's own country, an invisible line separates us. Where I turn my attention to fish and their watery realms and am bound to their orbits, he finds distractions in the fields and hills all around. I have become reconciled to it and no longer try to suck him into piscatory adventures.

Just a few months ago with summer at its height, my penchant for fishing brought me face-to-face yet again with a whole universe of new discovery. The warm, wet, solstice evenings saw unrestrained hatches of aquatic insects, many entirely new to me. They came rising off the water in clouds, accompanied by the meaty splashes of large, surface-feeding trout. For once my vast collection of fishing flies was found wanting. Evening after evening - with skeins of bugs spinning into the dusk, I was caught without a match for the hatch. The situation was intolerable and I set about its remedy.

In no time I was hunched over my fly-tying table, surrounded by all the bits of fur, feather, floss and fluff our craft is cluttered with and renowned for. With samples of the living creatures as a guide, I undertook the construction of all manner of cunning imitations. Chief among my labours was an attempt to imitate a little shell-backed iridescent green bug - a member of the Chrysomelidae family - which at times blanket the water, bringing the feeding fish to a boil.

Late one night, while all around me the household slept, I burned the midnight oil intent on conjuring a replica for the prismatic little beetle. Sean padded into the room bearing two mugs of scalding tea. He flopped into the rocking chair next to my fly-tying operation. "What have we here, dad?"
"It's that little green leaf-chewing bugger that has been keeping the fish from eating my flies," I told him. "Wow, that's really cool," he said, his eyes lighting up with an enthusiasm that I dared not trust. "Here, let me try one." He pushed my mug over to where I would need to rise if I hoped to reach it. As I did, he slid into my tying chair and adjusted the magni-light. "We use them to catch trout", I reminded him.

"Do you have any larger hooks?" he asked, bending purposefully into the task. Could this be true? Was my boy finally, after all these years, evincing an honest interest is something so seminal as fly-tying? Was this moment a harbinger of things more glorious to come? I warmed with an inner glow and paternal pride welled up into my eyes.

I showed him round the tying table, with each shelf baize-lined and compartmentalised, every part snugly filled with neatly fitting tubs and containers; the translucent canisters packed with premixed dubbings, the threads and waxes, the furs - muskrat, seal and rabbit. And then the skins; all in olive, furnace, blue dun, cream and amber, the dyed buck, squirrel and calf tails. We went through the feathers - jungle cock, golden pheasant, woodcock, grouse and old English game cock, the teal and mallard wings, the widgeon and ptarmigan. And the hooks - sneck, snell, limerick and perfect, in every size from minuscule thirty-two's to the brutal sixes and fours. I opened the tool drawer so that he might help himself to thread bobbins, cement needles, hackle pliers, whip-finishers, wing-burners, teasers, and parachute hackle-gallows.

"Wow", he said.
The moment was for me deeply emotional. Overcome almost, I left him to it, concerning myself elsewhere so that he could find his own pace and unsheathe his own creativity. When I went to bed some hours later he was still hard at work, hunched over the vise and surrounded by a halo of light that, in my conceit, seemed to radiate from his very centre.

Some days later, I tagged him. "How did your flies turn out?" I asked ingenuously. He dug into a pocket and removed a pair of oversized hooks cunningly dressed in a rainbow of colour. The hook points had been filed down and coated, each one with a neat blob of pearlescent epoxy. "I call them Millennium Bugs," he said smugly.

"Whadaya do that for?" I asked, perplexed. "You have entirely wrecked a pair of very fine titanium-coated, chemically-sharpened fishhooks."

"Can't you see they are earrings? It's R's birthday and I forgot to get her a gift," he said, nonchalantly slipping them back into a pocket. "Daddy dear, if you think they're for fishing, you're still a horse's ass". After all these years, my boy remembers and it helps not a jot to bemoan the passing of innocence.