THE EPIPHANY

SEEKING SOMETHING – A CHANGE, DISTRACTION, CONNECTION, RELIEF – SOME MIGHT SAY NICK FERREIRA CAME TO FLY FISHING LATE. BUT AS HE DESCRIBES HOW IT HAS MADE AN IMPACT ON HIS LIFE, HE MIGHT ARGUE IT FOUND HIM AT JUST THE RIGHT TIME.

Mokhotlong, Lesotho Day 1

It’s been one of those nights in a tent with the wind flapping and rain spattering the canvas, kept half-awake by the noise. The constant drumbeat is ominous for our plans to fish up the gorge tomorrow.

At some point the steady percussion on the tent changes tone, and I think the rain is easing. But, when I stick my head out, rain has turned to snow, settling rather than thudding onto the tent.

After sunrise I try some conversation around the fire, but I’m driven back under canvas by the wind and sleet. I give up the idea of fishing for the day, and retreat to my paperback and sleeping bag.

Around noon, water stops falling from the sky. The sun emerges and my tent warms. Outside, the valley is blanketed in white but the grass around our campsite is back to a damp yellow, and plumes of white mist rise from the ground like an army of ghosts. The sky clears, and the guides tell us to rig up.

Within an hour I’m casting a dry dropper up the bubble line and striking as 10-inch rainbows joyfully attack both dry and nymph.

Johann du Preez, international guide of mystery, raises an eyebrow at my beloved 7-foot 3-weight glass rod. Soft action, almost impossible to break a fish off, but does it have the backbone to deliver a nymph with precision?

For the first 40 years of my life, I had no interest in fishing. As a kid, I sometimes went to the Witbank Dam with a spinning rod to try to catch bass, under the supervision of family friends whose father had a boat and equipment, and knew just what to do.

My dad was a workaholic attorney who was not merely uninterested in, but actively disliked the great outdoors. If social pressure required his presence at, say, a dads-andlads camping weekend, he would sit talking and drinking at the braai while my brothers and I poked hopelessly at the tangle of line and sinker that immediately engulfed the cheap rod and reel Mom had bought for the occasion.

So when, as the first lockdown ended, my friend Rob invited my family to spend a weekend at their fishing place near Dullstroom, I was happy to go but didn’t plan to fish. I had been to that place before. Rob and I survived boarding school together and, from time to time, various combinations of boarders went out there for a weekend.

I had never touched a rod on any of those visits. I was always preoccupied with other goals. In 1993, hitting the other Form 1s with a kleilat (limited success); in 1997, after matric exams, getting intimate with my religious girlfriend (zero success); and in 2001, on a university holiday, trying to enjoy smoking dagga (manifest failure).

But I eventually said yes because we’d had enough of being stuck at home with Covid. At Rob’s suggestion, I bought a little spinning rod in case the kids wanted to have a go.

On the first evening, we all went down to the bottom dam. Using my son’s rod, I cast a black Woolly Bugger out and reeled it in. For some reason, when everyone else walked back up to the house, I stayed on the dam wall.

It was winter in the Mpumalanga highlands: dead still, with the dusk light turning luminous. I could hear my children laughing and shouting in the distance. No fish came.

At that precise moment, it got me. I don’t know how or why, but I understood instantly that standing by that water, casting occasionally and retrieving, thinking of fish, was something I wanted to do.

So began a process that every late-starting fly fisher knows: learning to cast a fly rod, with its peculiar rhythm and unnatural pause. Figuring out which knots attach leader to line, tippet to leader, fly to tippet. Getting advice from fishing shop guys (is it long enough? Is it strong enough? Will the knots hold?).

Many of those first knots did not hold. On one of the first solo days of fishing, after hours spent trying to present a fly to a rising fish, endless untangling from bushes behind me, I managed to induce a take on a dry fly. The fish probably just wanted to be left in peace. My clinch knot immediately gave way, leaving me with a curlicued tippet end and the trout with my DDD.

I washed arse-first down the Vaal after misreading the current strength. I swore maniacally at plants as I tried to get my fly out of a bullrush and into the path of a cruising fish. But I persisted, and improved.

Mokhotlong, Lesotho Day 2

It’s a good day to be fishing in the mountains. One of those days where, early on, you stop counting. Plenty of small, muscular Lesotho rainbows; a few medium rainbows; and even one or two baby browns. They all want a little copper Bead Nymph. At some point I switch to a silver bead just for variety, and immediately start getting refusals.

Just before lunch, Johann spots a proper fish, feeding in the river right beside us. We crawl up behind it, on the right bank, using a clump of yellow grass as a screen. The fish is relaxed, but it is close. Too close. How am I going to turn the leader over from here without lining him?

Johann holds the fly between thumb and forefinger. I straighten up onto my knees, slight shake in my hands. He nods. I whip the glass rod back and forth in the air. I just can’t get it to load. Flip, flap, splash, the line collapses into a pile of spaghetti on top of the fish, which scoots upstream so fast we lose sight of it.

“Fuck, sorry man. “Don’t say sorry. It was your fish.”

As we walk upriver, I think about asking Johann to take the next shot we get at a big fish, to get our team some redemption. I imagine there’s a guiding rule for this situation. Rule 12: when a client pathetically invites you to cast to a big fish, always refuse. If you miss the fish, he will not respect you; if you land it, he will not forgive you.

Friends and colleagues often ask me to explain my new obsession. I don’t have a complete answer.

But it’s probably not a coincidence that fly fishing came into my life at the same time that jolling went out.

I started partying when I was 14. Drinking made me feel more comfortable in my skin and made it easier to talk to girls. But it also felt like a grand rebellious gesture, a middle finger to the world. My friends and I liked to think we were after something more than just getting pissed –adventure, insight, transcendence. We were trying, in our fumbling, inept way, to get a feeling of connection, night after night, sucking the marrow out of life with booze and whatever else we could lay our hands on.

On some nights we achieved it. Out in a field in Somerset, as the sun sets, and Arcade Fire starts to play; the universe would open up and merge with us, merge us into each other and the rest of the crowd and the band. Or at least it felt that way.

But eventually it started to be nothing more than the thing we always did when we saw each other, a routine obliteration of consciousness, a dulling rather than a sharpening. I’d had enough, and I was scared by what addiction had done to the beautiful mind of someone I love.

So is it a coincidence I started fishing around the same time I got sober? I don’t think it was. Fly fishing primes you for transcendence.

You are outside, an animal amongst animals, in their world. The weather does things to you. You get burnt, wet, tired. You watch, listen, pay attention. Your mind is solving problems set by fish and insects and trees and water. You try to put yourself into the mind of a fish, to fool a fish, to catch it.

While you are paying this kind of attention, you are fully present wherever you are, and that is usually a place of transcendent, natural beauty. You have the chance to be fully connected.

Connected to what? Why, a fish, and its underwater realm; a river; a lake; an ecology.

When you do what you are supposed to do, and the fish do what they are supposed to do (neither of which is guaranteed), you will hook one

Then there is that shocking tug on the other end of the line, an animal trying to get off your hook, a life which is in that moment connected to your life. On the other end of what David Profumo calls the “lightning thread”, is another wild animal, fighting you. And then, non-fishing friends ask, do you eat the fish? Not usually. Mostly I net it, maybe photograph it, take the hook out of its mouth and watch it swim away, back into its underwater world.

I like that moment of release very much. It feels reverent, sacred. It is an encounter with wildness ending as it should, with the world returning to its place, leaving me with a beating heart and shaky hands.

Mokhotlong, Lesotho Day 3

Before we set out on the hike down to the river, Johann hands me a 10-foot 4-weight graphite rod. “Let’s see how you go with this.” My casting improves instantly – better control, more distance, easier to turn and straighten the long leader.

The river is flowing due to the melting snow and rain. The water is crystal clear, and we can see plenty of fish. But they are fussy today. The previous couple of days, any likely looking drift down a bubble line drew a strike. But today they chase and then turn away, regardless of fly, depth, or drift.

Just before lunch, Johann and Ruhan Kruger bring me up to a large, shallow, still pool where they know some monsters live. They instantly spot two fish doing a slow circuit of the pool. One good fish. And one very good fish.

We go into stalking mode, with Johan watching the fish from high on the bank and talking us into position on a two-way radio. We crawl into place, moving only when the fish is cruising upstream away from us, and freezing whenever we are in its line of sight. After 45 minutes of crouch, crawl, freeze, Ruhan is satisfied.

“OK, vat jou skoot [OK, take your shot].”

He wants me to cast the dry fly and dropper nymph into the middle of the pool in front of me. Timing is everything, as the cast must land ahead of the cruising monster-fish, but the delivery must happen out of its line of sight.

I am aware of being watched by three guides and one client, sitting high on a cliff behind me. The line and rig sit on the ground on the bedrock beside me.

A gusting wind starts blowing into my face. I blow the first cast, short of the middle of the pool; I pick up immediately and cast again, this wind, short again. Both fish spooked, another chance gone.

We stop for lunch. Chicken wraps and silence.

We walk on up the river, staying well back from the water. Last week Ruhan and Johann found another big fish in a depression between some rocks on the riverbed. They reckon it might still be there. They think it’s a big brown, judging by the way it behaved.

Ruhan goes ahead and radios back: “Hy’s hier. Moerse groot vis [He’s here. Bloody big fish].”

The fish is lying deep, in a trough in the riverbed, protected by a small curved wall of rocks and boulders on the far side of the depression. Above the fish, two current lines converge in a sharp, clear seam.

We are downstream, on the right-hand bank, in front of a sandbank.

“You ready to go get him?” “Yebo.”

Slowly, Johann and I make our way down onto the sandbank.

“You must cast leader only in front of him, onto that point halfway between the submerged white rock and the far bank.”

It’s about a 30-metre cast from where we are, to my 11 o’clock. Blessedly, there is no bush behind me, nothing but clear air for a straight back cast over the river. I can feel the wind at my back. Somehow, the previous failures have freed me of anxiety.

I make two false casts, then release. The line unfurls. The luminous orange post of the dry fly lands, to the left and slightly short of target. I let it drift back past the fish, then pick up, cast again.

Better this time, but still too far left of the bubble line. Drift back, pick up, cast again. FUCK, short again.

I don’t think. I lift the line again, watch it straighten behind me, punch forward. It unfurls, leader uncoiling at head height.

The dry lands in the middle of that tight, dark seam of water, about 1,5 metres ahead of the lie.

Time stands still. For an eternity, there is nothing in the universe but a bright orange piece of poly-yarn accelerating into a seam of current like a miniature whitewater raft entering a rapid. I see, hear nothing else.

Impossibly, almost imperceptibly, as it drifts over the lie, the orange post disappears under water.

I lift my right arm and tighten the line. There is a solid, heavy pull on my left hand.

That big river fish took the nymph. And now she is on.

Ruhan and Johann erupt.

She jumps once, high, shaking her head in fury, a glowing pink stripe down her side, desperate to throw the hook. I keep the rod tip up, with a shaking hand, and then she is in the net.

For the guides, she is the fish of the season (albeit only a two-week exploratory season), and the ultimate exercise of their skill to get a chump like me into a fish like that. To me she is the fish of a lifetime – not as big as some trout out of stillwaters, but a big wild fish from a wild river and, somehow, a consummation, a confirmation, a celebration.

There is something of that moment in me still as I write this, some remnant of transcendence and presence and joy.

I watch her slip away, over the sandbar. And then she is gone, back to her world, and I am on my knees in a flowing river, and time starts to move again.