First Bite - Romance - Andrew Savs A regular witty column on all things flyfishing and beyond

Savs

His itchy feet began to develop barely three weeks into isolation. The Sensei is not given to overt displays of emotion and I can’t imagine that he was pacing the floor exactly, but he couldn’t have been a riot to live.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that coexisting with the man is easy at the best of times, but being holed up in an apartment with a three-year-old for weeks on end will drive the most reasonable man to to ‘act out’ a little.

In times of stress dark thoughts will inevitably creep their way into the most balanced mind. The least of these thoughts, and a truly victimless crime, would be to travel for reasons not, in the contemporary legal sense, ‘essential’.

Decisions involving the lessor of two evils most often make themselves and before long my phone began pinging with incoming satellite images of various rivers that flow through the city. The images had been painstakingly marked-up to show likely productive areas, safe parking and easy access points. By ‘easy access’ I mean ‘well-concealed’. Like bunking English class to smoke behind the woodwork room the whole endeavour had a certain rakish romance about it and I immersed myself in the role of enthusiastic accomplice.

Any preconceived notion of romance ended pretty damned smartly when our first meeting point was described to me as being “straight down the road, right next to the sewage plant”. Now I try in most things to maintain a positive disposition. It wasn’t easy with the fetid tang of a million shits hanging heavily in the air about me as I strung up my rod.

We fished some way up what turned out to be a remarkably pretty stream. Just as we were far enough from our vehicles to be too far from our vehicles the dull, overcast day was rent without warning by a massive thunderstorm. It swept together the filth from the adjacent highway and deposited it in impressive volumes by means of an otherwise rather striking waterfall into the river and onto us.

In minutes the river smelled like a runaway

fire in a merkin factory.

Our second attempt yielded better results. We fished another urban stream that we knew for a fact to hold a small population of fish and caught just enough to be able to say with some conviction that we “got some”. It was fun, in it’s own way, and having company again was great, but by the time that we were able to venture beyond the city limits I think that we were both grateful for it.

We were of course targeting Natal yellowfish. As far as species go the scaly is certainly en vogue these days. And sure, why not? They’re a cool enough catch on a fly rod and will keep you entertained for a while, although my overwhelming impression of them is that they’re not exactly bright.

Unless a scaly is of almost trophy size it just zips around aimlessly in the belly of a pool until it tires out and pretty much allows itself to be landed. Granted, they’re hardly ugly to look at and when they reach trophy proportions they take off like bullet trains, casually breaking tippets and anglers’ hearts. The only problem is that there are just not a lot of trophy sized scaly around - if there were they wouldn’t be trophies, right?

The larger ones are impressive enough though to have local anglers assign to them the epithet of ‘freshwater GT’ or ‘freshwater bonefish’, depending on the particular angler’s view of these things. I don’t know about you, but to me any species that needs to be described as something that it isn’t, isn’t.

There was a time when the expression would have been ‘a poor man’s GT’, but I suppose it’s hard to think of someone as poor when they have easily ten grand’s worth of tackle in their hand and another ten hanging off their ass. Either way, I just don’t think that pimping on behalf of fish really helps their reputation in any meaningful way. You don’t hear people talking up a GT do you? I’ve never heard anyone say “that’s a GT, or as we call them round here, a flats marlin”.

Ok, relax - I like scaly just fine. I actually look forward to them in the months when the trout season is closed. They’re found in pretty places, even in town, and there’s always the hope that you’ll luck into a big one.

They just lack the romance of the salmonids. If catching a wild trout can be compared to a candlelit dinner with an elegant lady in a fine restaurant then catching a scaly is a quickie in the McDonalds parking lot with a girl you just met.

And speaking of salmonids, would you believe I recently saw one in an urban stream not twenty minutes from my front gate?

The first rumours of brown trout being introduced to a stream in the greater Durban area go back a few years. We laughed them off at the time, but the rumours were persistent and were mostly congruous with one another.

Over time I poked for information where I could but there was little of any real substance to be had from people who claimed to be in the know. Various versions of the same story came to light; a local stream was stocked as a joke or some sort of

In some versions of what I began to suspect was an urban legend the fish soon died out. In others the trout found a foothold and are still there to be caught.

About two years ago the trail went dead. There’s a lot of water in the area where the release was said to have taken place and with much of it almost inaccessible I didn’t bother to go search for them myself - you could call me lazy, and you’d be right.

I didn’t think about it again until it came up in a discussion in a tackle store earlier this year. “Yes”, a fellow customer affirmed, “I know the guy who put them in there”. I leaned hard on the counter and took a deep breath to steady myself. In a single call I had GPS coordinates. It turned out to be that simple - you just had to ask.

An hour later, with cold beers between the seats for the unlikely event of a celebration, a friend and I raced off to find these urban trout for ourselves.

Like a lot of things that are highly anticipated this was fairly anticlimactic. The most recent passing of Haley’s Comet, for example, may have been an event of cosmic significance but for your average punter it was just a blur not worth staying up for.

The stream was tiny in midwinter. I would have liked to have seen small trout sipping midges here-and-there or gulping terrestrials along the margins. All I did was to spook a small one in an inch or two of water from its crack in a rock.

I haven’t been back to try to catch one. Somehow, and this annoys me, I get an uneasy feeling that it would ruin the whole thing to actually do that. Just knowing that they’re there and then leaving them alone seems the far more romantic option.

But then what do I know about romance? I spend my winters fishing for scaly.