The Origins of South African Title Flyfishing written by First Second Name Ian Cox name Photos: other
It is widely believed that flyfishing came to South Africa with the introduction of trout in the 1890’s and that it was impossible to catch yellowfish on fly before the invention of the TVN nymph. But nothing could be further from the truth.
The early history of flyfishing in South Africa was all about targeting native species such as yellowfish, witvis and kurper. As Bertie Bennion pointed his book The Angler in South Africa that was published over a century later these fish were targeting by what he called ground fishing as well as flyfishing.
Bill Hansford Steel writes tantalisingly of flyfishers targeting native fish in the late 1700’s but does not cite a source for this statement. Craig Thom who has a talent for close research tracked down a reference in Lord Sommerville’s journal to an attempt to catch yellowfish on fly on the Reit River in 1801. Craig has tracked down where they fished and he and his daughter have caught yellowfish on fly at that location.
According to Hansford Steele traditional English flies of that time such as the Greenwell’s Glory and the Black Gnat which were brought out in the luggage of travellers rather than being specially imported. Both he and Bennion were of the view that flytying only began in the 20th century. But one must question whether this was indeed so. After all Canon Pennington was encouraging boys to take up flytying as early as 1909.
That, of course is a story in and of itself which we hope that Craig will publish one day.
His book Trout Fishing for South African boys suggest a robust make your own culture that
But there should be nothing surprising in this. We know the English were avid anglers and that fly fishing was already popular in the United Kingdom at the end of the eighteenth century. The first British occupation began in 1795 but Englishman started arriving in the Cape before that. My wife’s ancestor, for example, came out in 1791 as an English teacher and settled in Swellendam. While history does not relate whether he was a flyfisher, he was of a class and came from a district where flyfishing was already popular in Britain. Officer’s in the army travelled nowhere without their guns and their fishing rods. Many of these would have been fly rods. www.saflyfishingmag.co.za
was already in existence in the early 20th century. According to him a boy with a pocketknife, a few hooks and a ball of string and a bit of ingenuity could achieve much. You made your own kit or did not fish. It was what he did as a boy in the North of England. “And the first trout”, he exulted, “a lively fellow rising beyond a bed of weeds under the shadow of the old grey church, caught with a home-made fly on a self-knotted, selfselected horse hair caste, was to me the bursting of a bud that grew into a strong branch on a sturdy tree.”
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