GOLDEN THREADS

from The Mission Fly Fishing Magazine Issue #30

Chum

JEEP APPAREL X THE MISSION

GOLDEN THREADS

WE TEAMED UP WITH JEEP APPAREL FOR A MISSION TO THE ORANGE RIVER. DESPITE LIFE DISHING UP METAPHORICAL LEMONS, WITH BRILLIANT NEW CLOBBER, THREE FISHING SHMODELS WITH MAD SKILLZ AND A SOUPED-UP JEEP WRANGLER SAHARA, WE STILL MANAGED TO MAKE LEMONADE.

By Tudor Caradoc-Davies Photos Ryan Janssens, Gabriel Botha

Something that’s always bothered me about the Jason Bourne series is how, in the second movie he moves to Goa, India, with his Swiss girlfriend in an attempt to get away from his old life as a CIA assassin and to ensure that nobody finds them ever again. For a smart guy with survival instincts, that was a dumb move. I’ve been to Goa. It’s BUSY. There are lots of tourists, but that does not mean you, as a pair of Caucasians, will meld into the crowd, because there are way more locals. If you’re Jason Bourne, it was always going to be just a matter of time until (SPOILER ALERT), a Russian hitman pops up out of nowhere and tries to kill you and your missus.

Now if Jason had moved to Pofadder in the Northern Cape of South Africa, his chances of living a long, happy, sun-baked life would have increased exponentially. Not only can Matt Damon pass himself off as an Afrikaner (see his role as Bok legend Francois Pienaar in Invictus) thereby ensuring he does not stick out in the far reaches of the Northern Cape but, as a capable guy he could have reinvented himself as a mechanic, a farmer, a professional hermit or a fly -fishing guide on the Orange River. This was top of mind as we made our way out of Pofadder with just the last stretch of the drive down to Red Rock River Camp at Onseepkans ahead of us. As we rumbled in convoy past the village’s solitary church, hotel and a few grids of neat houses with cactus gardens, we stopped briefly to get ice and a pink tennis visor from the curio shelf that said POFADDER. I said to no one in particular, “I get the sense that if you live in a place like Pofadder, it’s because your family is from here and that is your life. But, if you moved out here, you’re running away from something.”

“JEEP APPAREL’S NEW RANGE WAS DESIGNED SO THAT YOU CAN WEAR IT ON THE WATER, IN THE BUSH, OR UP A MOUNTAIN AND THEN FIT BACK INTO SOCIETY AGAIN WITHOUT BEING LABELLED A SARTORIAL PARIAH.”

Bod, my partner in crime on this fine fishing rag, looked across the vast nothingness of desertscape around us and said, “That, or you really just want to spend the rest of your days fishing the Orange River like me.” Talking of reinventing yourself, that seemed to be the inadvertent theme for this trip. We weren’t filming a Bourne movie, but had rather partnered up with Jeep Apparel, makers of gritty outdoor/urban clobber, who have come out with a new range of clothing that they wanted to test in the field on us. That was why we also had a Jeep Wrangler Sahara 3,6L V6 to play with. As for our shmodels, Gabriel, Brett and Bod, well they were not Jason Bourne, but they can all fish and they were up to the job of testing the new Jeep Apparel range while fishing. While it wasn’t by design, each of them also embodied the theme of reinvention.

Gabriel was with us because, as shmodels go, he is still in his 20s, good-looking and doesn’t have to think about whether eating those carbs was a good idea. Plus, as an editor and cameraman, he works with Ryan our photographer a lot and had a multi-faceted role to fish, pose and shoot. His reinvention came early when, after studying industrial psychology at Stellenbosch, it dawned on him that that was not going to be the career for him. He is now sought-after for his filming and editing skills. As far as modelling credentials go, Brett actually was/is a model so he knew, more than anyone, how to turn on the blue steel vibes. Brett has also reinvented himself a few times from commercial property to publishing magazines (The Lake), to selling fly rods and reels (Taylor). He has found his calling now owning and running 131A Gallery in Cape Town, where every artist worth their salt seems to want to be. Brett fishes a lot, but had little experience of yellowfish and had not been to the Orange before. Gabriel on the other hand has caught plenty on the Vaal and kills it on the Clanwilliam yellowfish front, but had also never made it to the Orange.

The third Orange River virgin was Bod, aka Brendan Body, The Mission’s art director. Bod’s a balaclava model, but he was there because he is 6’6” and looks okay if shot with a long lens from a distance. Also, because he would probably have set fire to The Mission offices if he hadn’t been included. An enigma wrapped in a papsak, smoked like a bindi, back when Bod started and ran Session Skateboarding Magazine, he lived in Gauteng where he spent years fishing the Vaal and its tribs for smallmouth and largemouth yellows. Then he moved to the Cape, where he eventually launched The Mission with me and Conrad Botes. Since he’s lived down south he has been obsessed with the trickier cousins of those Vaal fish, the Clanwilliam yellows. However, for a man who never shuts up, the thing he has shut up the least about over the last few years, was a trip to the Orange. So this was something he had been looking forward to for years. Hence the deep thoughts he had about relocating to Pofadder. When the new apparel was handed out, there was almost a palpable surprise at how well it suited these guys both in terms of how it looked and how it performed on the water. The new range is a fresh departure from what you might expect from Jeep Apparel’s standard styling of the last few years and is aimed at a crowd that favours versatility in a garment. It was designed so that you can wear it on the water, in the bush, or up a mountain and then fit back into society again without being labelled a sartorial pariah. If you’ve ever gone straight from fly fishing to a bar or a restaurant, dressed like a piscatorial gnome, a court jester or a rodeo clown, you’ll know what I’m talking about. And while not specifically designed for fly fishing (which usually means doubling the price), this range felt like it might well have been designed with fly fishing in mind. We’re talking quick-dry fabrics with stretch which helps when rockhopping or casting, materials like ripstop for durability and smart detailing from haemostat loops to zippered pockets, perfect for a fly box or a phone. It’s makes perfect sense that with this new range Jeep would want to appeal to a much bigger target market than just the fly-fishing crowd, but it was interesting to discover that they do in fact have history with fly-fishing clobber. In fact, years ago they kitted out the original Flycastaway team of Gerhard Loubscher, Arno Matthee and Keith Rose-Innes in technical fishing shirts and sponsored a fishing series called Hook, Line and Jeep. Their new technical shirt worn day-in day-out by Bod,

IF YOU’RE A CITY SLICKER LIKE US, YOU SPEND A LOT OF TIME GAWKING SLACK-JAWED AT THE SCENERY”

Brett and Gabriel, is a more than worthy successor to those earlier styles. It still ticks all the tech shirt boxes – plenty of utility, quick-drying and easy to move in - but boasts a much improved fit and look. If you’re regular city slickers like us, you find yourself spending a lot of time along the Orange gawking slack-jawed at the scenery, trying to make sense of what you see. The landscape feels truly lunar or Martian and the settlements could easily have been the inspiration for George Lucas’s Tattooine in Star Wars. Piles of ochre boulders ranging from the size of a man to that of a house, form mountains on both the South African and Namibian sides of the river. A green rash of riverine vegetation runs through the desert, its curves swollen by agriculture in places. All along the Onseepkans stretch, there were signs of both initiative and decay. A brand-new rose geranium farm and its expensive-looking equipment all funded by government lies abandoned, while a well-irrigated grape farm looks almost too neat to be real. The Spanish Mission looked immaculate next to a pile of burnt cans. Dotted here and there were derelict houses that belonged to the original farmers who grew cotton and watermelons up here.

On the first day, like aliens, we probed gently around our new planet, but once we figured out the basics of where to shower, find a canoe and a cold beer, the days quickly found their own routine. Gabriel and Ryan analysed the weather apps with the foreboding of ancient druids reading the entrails of a badger. As we arrived, there was a lowpressure system so when the first day went by with hardly a fish coming to hand, we weren’t entirely surprised, but we weren’t overly upset. The barometer settled and our second day was looking good with the third day earmarked as the winner (in so far as one can get excited about something as unreliable as a fishing prediction based on the weather). There was life everywhere, from barbel and muddies stuffing around on top, to schools of smallmouth yellows we could spot from atop our canoes. The problem was, we were hardly catching. A juvenile largie here, a barbel or muddy there. The odd smallmouth yellow. Visually, it looked perfect. Undercut banks against the reeds, deep boulder-dotted seams, threads and braids splitting and re-joining again and again. We tried to target the bigger, slower moving pools, fed from multiple sides upstream by rapids, because it was at the tail-outs that all our more experienced friends and guides had told us we would find good fish. Above the water, there was a considerable amount of wildlife, which was a little surprising given that we were floating through a desert. Vervet monkeys and baboons let off alarm calls both at us (you get the feeling they’re a lot shyer than the troops closer to the city) and at each other. A pair of fish eagles circled overhead, Giant kingfishers made a beeline for honey holes with the kind of certainty we wish we had ourselves and we interrupted the same Goliath heron on multiple occasions as he moved downstream each time we got close.

Make no mistake about it, the fishing was not on and we were beginning to feel it. The problem with social media is that it’s hard not to compare your trip to images of what has just happened on the Orange River, somewhere else along it’s 2200km length. We’d seen recent trip reports of guys who had blanked hard and others who had been smashing fish, catching behemoth largies in particular. Pre social media, that kind of expectation would never have existed. Now we were burdened by performance anxiety. What if we didn’t catch? There’s a special kind of pressure that comes with a collab like this. Obviously, we’re working together to test the gear and get the shots, but beyond that we needed to catch fish. It’s a heavier need than if we were just fishing on our own. On your own you can have bad luck, bad weather or fish like a poephol and simply write it off to experience. When you need to catch fish to make a collab story, total failure is just not an option.

We queried pressure from the weather, pressure from humans (we found nets along our route), pressure from the massive floods last year and we wondered if maybe there just weren’t that many fish around on this section. Then we countered our own arguments with the stories we knew of friends who had been here and done well and reassured ourselves about others who had been here and done worse. We gave ourselves pep talks and convinced ourselves over evening campfires or morning coffees that today would be better. It didn’t matter - doubt had crept into our camp.

Bodies too accustomed to sitting at desks get stretched out paddling on each day’s 10km route. There’s a solid age gap between Bod, Brett and myself in our 40s, Ryan in his 30s and Gabriel in his 20s and nowhere was this clearer in who groaned the loudest around the campfire at night.

“WE GAVE OURSELVES PEP TALKS AND CONVINCED OURSELVES OVER EVENING CAMPFIRES OR MORNING COFFEES THAT TODAY WOULD BE BETTER. IT DIDN’T MATTER - DOUBT HAD CREPT INTO OUR CAMP.”

“We’ll never take gold for synchronized swimming at the Olympics if you refuse to mirror my hips!”

The only body not complaining was Brendan Body. He was in his element, coursing a charge of positivity through the group as he seemed to get stronger, more confident and to fish better with each passing day. The pink visor of shame which he had won on two consecutive days for losing (and having rescued) his 5-panel cap and for putting his lifejacket on inside out and upside down, was now his by rights, a crown of glory and pride that came out when he started catching fish. He’d become someone else, a symbol of rebirth, Zef Pofadder, the Phoenix, the spirit animal of this trip. Tall and animated, fuelled by brandy sidecars and smokes, each night below the Milky Way and shooting stars he’d strut around the pit braai, kicking up dust like a prehistoric rooster, throwing cave man shadows in the dirt, re-living and re-enacting each and every fish that had come to hand. Every trip needs a lucky talisman and Bod was it. Still, there was a point with 2km to go on the third and final day, where things were looking dire. Even though the UV protection on Jeep Apparel’s tech shirts kept us cool, under the baking 38° sun it was hot as hell. Our belief was at an all-time low and there were only a few more solid sections before the take-out point. We came to a section where the river split in two around an island. On what looked like the deeper, left-hand side we could see that Gabe had suddenly found a honey hole, catching two good smallies in quick succession and losing a third. I went down the left, by-passing Gabe from some distance so I could fish the tailout. Bod and Ryan went down the right-hand side. While where they were looked a lot shallower, there was a good channel carving off a sandbank and running up against the reeds.

Ryan got hit first but missed the fish, something with shoulders judging by his anguish. Bod was in first with a largemouth on a black muishond, causing retarded high fives to be thrown and whoops whooped. Ryan missed another, then Bod was on again. This time it was a much bigger smallie, a magnificent pulchritudinous Kardashian of a fish weighing in at 8lbs. He followed that up with another decent smallie.

I watched this play out from about 80m away downstream, too far down to get back up against the current and join them, but not far away enough to be out of earshot. Desperately bombing out casts of my own, I was happy for them, but also envious as all hell. This was the twist in the tale. A golden thread in the river. If I’d had earphones on me, it would have been the perfect moment to play the Jason Bourne theme tune.

“BOD HAD BECOME SOMEONE ELSE, A SYMBOL OF REBIRTH, ZEF POFADDER, THE PHOENIX, THE SPIRIT ANIMAL OF THIS TRIP.”

5-PANEL CAP

“ONE OF THE BEST 5-PANELS I’VE WORN, I ASKED FOR TWO” - BOD

CITY MOON BAG

JEEP APPAREL

SHOP THE MISSION

CITY COMMUTER JACKET

WATER REPELLENT / PACKABLE / WINDPROOF - R1299 “THE KHAKI COLOR BLOCK JACKET WAS MY GO TO FOR THE TRIP, SUPER LIGHTWEIGHT, STEEZY, DURABLE AND HAS MORE POCKETS THAN A SNOOKER TABLE” - BRETT BELLAIRS