Editorial

The Conference of the People or COP 25 conference on climate change that took place in Madrid in December last year was an unmitigated disaster for countries like South Africa. South Africa is warming at double the global average and has been designated a global hotspot. Our Climate Change Bill was drafted on the basis that the major economies would reduce their carbon emissions and provide financial assistance to hotspots like South Africa to assist them in doing the same. Neither is likely to happen any time soon. As Greta Thunberg pithily put it, the conference “seems to have turned into some kind of opportunity for countries to negotiate loopholes.”

This is not good news for trout fishing. Research conducted in in the Eastern Cape in 2018 applied climate modelling to predict the future distribution range of trout in the region. The picture is bleak with the likely range being reduced to less than half the existing range. Though specific research has still to be conducted in other provinces, it seems likely that the position in the Western Cape which is also becoming drier will be similarly bleak.

Sadly, while there is an increasing amount of much needed research into what South Africa will look like in the future, this has not stopped environmental authorities from continuing to argue that trout pose a major risk to biodiversity in South Africa despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. This backward looking ideologically driven approach to environmental management is likely to misdirect and hamper the very real efforts that will be required to enable South Africans to successfully adapt to what is going to be a rapidly changing world.

So, it is perhaps apposite, as we face the end of what has been a golden era of trout fishing in South Africa, that we recognise the end of another great era in South African flyfishing.

Yes, the great and much-loved Tom Sutcliffe is putting away his wading boots. Arthritis is increasingly robbing him of the ability to fish his beloved small mountain streams as they ought to be fished.

This news has added poignancy for me as I remember the day, when my father at much the same age as Tom made a similar decision. That was some ten years ago and like Tom, Dad continued to fish still waters for a while, but it is not the same. On a happier note, my father is still around some ten years later as Tom undoubtedly will be.

South African flyfishing and Trout Fishing has such a rich history. Tom has been an integral part of that history for longer than I can remember. We at Southern African Flyfishing look forward to enjoying the benefits of his wisdom and stories for many tears to come

And yes, trout fishing is going to become increasingly restricted in the years that lie ahead, but that does not mean that it will be any less enjoyable or that flyfishing itself will suffer. Even I, as a died in the wool trout angler, acknowledge and enjoy the fact that there are many other species that rise to the fly in this country.

I only hope that we do not lose those fisheries to the twin scourges of pollution and over abstraction of water that are presently devastating so many of our rivers.