Keep It Tidy
Telling Stories
by Savs My personal mission, not all that long ago, was to be the guy with the worst tackle who caught the best fish. I made it halfway too; my gear was atrocious. It was slapped-together junk of indeterminate age that, even in its heyday, would have been considered of significantly more utility in hand-tohand combat than on a trout stream. This period found me cultivating myself in the self-imagined mould of a Discerning Country Gentleman (a DCG). I bought books on birds and spent as much time squinting up at the skies as I did looking down at the river. I carried a neat zinger with a compass built into it in order to note the direction of the river relative to the passing of the sun so that, someday, I could say something brilliant about azimuths and valley orientations and how all this ensured that the straps of my creel frequently cut deeply into my shoulder. I pinned classic patterns into the sheepskin band of my equally classic hat and I faithfully memorised their burlesque recipes. In my truck resided a hermetically sealed folder of topographical maps and I would record onto them with red asterisks anywhere where a contour line on a water course looked vaguely different from those around it. I wore through the knees of a pair of heavy khaki trousers as I turned over rocks on the stream bed to look at the bugs that sheltered under them and I would save an ecologically sustainable sample of each of them in small glass vials so that I could on my return home identify them. My pocket reference guide to common trees would be extracted under a comfortable bower as I took my midday tea and I would reference the illustrations in the book to the shape of the foliage above me and the pattern of the bark against which I reclined. I was working hard to cultivate an aesthetic and, despite some paltry wins, I was entirely pitiful at it. To this day I can’t tell a tit from a toucan. The maps went with the truck when I sold it and it never crossed my mind to ask for them back.
www.saflyfishingmag.co.za
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