TRIBUTE
FISHERMAN’S FRIEND OF PIPE TOBACCO, ZAK’S, CORDITE, AND BLACK LABEL QUARTS – J A D E D O S S A N T O S R E M E M B E R S T H E L AT E G R E AT B A S I E V O S L O O - FA R M E R , A N G L E R , P I O N E E R A N D F R I E N D T O M A N Y W H O V I S I T E D RHODES IN THE EASTERN CAPE. Photo. Tom Sutcliffe
A few weeks back, I caught myself daydreaming about the high up places with Lilliputian streams, and said out loud, as if to make it true, that I needed to go back to the North Eastern Cape and visit a few old friends.
being part of the famed Wild Trout Association, but key in its development, forming the association with Dave Walker in 1991. This opened access to hundreds of kilometres of water to those in pursuit of tiny streams, wild trout, and as a result, created a Mecca for South African fly fishermen.
And while I will be back in the mountains and I will stop in at the farm Birkhall, I am sad to say one friend I won’t be seeing, is Basie Vosloo.
We fly fishermen all owe Basie a debt of gratitude, a debt I don’t think anyone who has fished Rhodes can honestly say they could ever repay, so great has his influence been in the world of small stream trout in South Africa.
Basie and Carien Vosloo had a larger bearing on my life than I think they knew about. Almost a decade ago, green as a leaf, I arrived in Rhodes on a 3 week solo fishing trip to explore the fabled mountain streams, looking for 4 inch trophy trout and adventure. I got all of that, and so much more. Due mostly to incredible people I met along the way, such as Ed Herbst, Basie & Carien Vosloo, Dave Walker, Tony Kietzman, and Fred Steynberg, that one trip became an annual trip for about 4 years, until the natural progression of life found me more behind a desk than in the mountains I so love. While my head is now stuck mostly in the humdrum of life in Johannesburg, my heart was still firmly caught in the networks of streams in those rolling hills and sandstone mountains. The Vosloos took me in after three weeks of traveling around the blue-lined mountains of Rhodes, giving me a warm bed, a place at their table, a stool at Basie’s pub, and filling my heart with love and my head with memories to keep me close to the streams that can sometimes seem so far away. I was even given the odd farm job, as Basie told me that I needed to “earn my keep” while sitting together one night in the pub. To this day, I still feel desperately unworthy of the kindness and love they bestowed upon me during my stay on Birkhall. The Vosloo family are salt of the earth, and custodians of the land they farmed for generations. The custodianship of the land that was so in their blood, led to Basie not just
20
Basie was an enigma and few people knew him better, as guests and as adopted-family, than Tom Sutcliffe and Ed Herbst. Both men spent many days on the farm with Basie, sharing water and beer alike. One of Ed’s favourite descriptions of Basie came from the late playwright and angler, Robert Brandon-Kirby, who in his 1993 coffee table book, ‘Fly Fishing in Southern Africa’ said: “Vosloo is one of those extraordinary human surprises that occur in the world of fly-fishing. At first when you meet him, the only impression that he makes is that of the stereotypical, tough, case-hardened Afrikaner farmer. But a few hours in his company reveal an intriguing inner man. The casing, sun-tanned and rough, conceals a highly developed taste in the worthier examples of modern music, a deep knowledge of the plays of Oscar Wilde, and a poetic soul. He runs a pack of pedigreed gun dogs and is an excellent shot. He rides like a professional and lives with an enthusiasm for the world’. Decades of friendship have been captured in Tom’s books, Shadows on the Stream Bed, Hunting Trout and Yet More Sweet Days, immortalising a man that has etched a place in South African fly- fishing history. If Rhodes is the centre of the universe, the Vosloo’s home farm Birkhall is her spiritual home, as it has been home to so many anglers over the years, and as Tom so beautifully describes. “There were days, countless of them over the years, when we just sat chatting on the veranda of Birkhall, gazing across views along the tree-laced river valley, sometimes with an early mug of coffee seeing in a sunrise, or watching
W W W. T H E M I S S I O N F LY M A G . C O M
