TOPWATER TIGER KINGS

HOW TWO SALTWATER SEMI-SURFACE PATTERNS UNLOCKED THE TOPWATER TIGER BITE AT PONGOLA AND UNLEASHED RICHARD WALE’S MOUSTACHE AND MULLET UPON THE WORLD.

Photos Mavungana Flyfishing and guide team

Iwas lying on the couch minding my own business in Cape Town when a WhatsApp message pinged from my mate Tyron Knight, with a photo. As the image took a moment to load, I read the proverbial fine print.

“Keep it on the DL and don’t show anyone yet.”

In fly-fishing circles that sort of disclaimer attached to a photo usually means that either the location is sensitive, the fish is spectacular, or the method on which it was caught is unusual. Ty was messaging me from Pongola where he was guiding for Mavungana Flyfishing on Lake Jozini during the autumn tigerfish season. The photo he sent was of Mavungana’s head honcho, Jono Bolton, and the fish he was gripping and grinning was his PB tiger taken on a topwater fly. Jono has been fishing and guiding on Pongola for north of 20 years, so a PB topwater flycaught fish on that system is, for him, an extremely special fish. But what made it extra-special for me was the fly that was lodged in the scissor of the tiger’s jaw.

It was a topwater Stella, a fly I had developed for a totally different fishery that sits a few hundred metres from my home in Cape Town.

For those uninitiated in the ways of tigers, let me put this into perspective. Ninety-five per cent of the tigerfish you catch on fly are caught deep on fast-sinking lines with heavily weighted Clousers in black and red or black and purple. Whether it’s the Zambezi or other tiger fisheries across Africa, it’s hard to go wrong with that simple yet lethal combination. That’s not to say they are not caught on surface patterns from time to time, when anglers are willing to take along a floating line, some flippers, gurglers and other surface patterns and put in the time in low-light conditions to entice a surface eat. Pongola or Lake Jozini, where Ty was guiding, is a different kind of tiger fishery. You will catch fish the regular way, with Clousers and sinking or intermediate lines, but you stand a very good chance of catching fish on the surface or just sub-surface thanks to Pongola’s unique flooded grassland margins.

Tyron and I have fished and tied flies together quite a bit down in the Western Cape. We share a home water estuary, Zandvlei, on which I developed the Stella to target leervis (garrick) that feed on the vlei’s Gilchristella aestuaria (aka Gilchrist’s round herring, a small shoaling estuarine baitfish) on shallow banks and in weed beds. I fish the vlei frequently and although the mouth is opened and closed on a fairly regular basis, there is generally little to no tidal water movement. Having fished poppers, crease flies, sliders, flippers, etc. for years in the vlei, I have witnessed the nuances of how leerie feed on the Gilchristella. The eat is very different to that of leerie chasing other baitfish. The Gilchristella frolic and swirl in low light conditions, just breaking the surface but not fully jumping out. When the leerie feed on them, the leerie often roll like tarpon or make a sudden gulp on the surface. When the Gilchristella are predated on they appear to panic on the surface, sending out tiny water droplets. If you analyse it for hours on end you will notice that this interaction is quite different from the typical mullet jumping out the water with a leerie hot on its tail.

Determined to improve my leerie catch rate and with Gilchristella action on the brain, I sat at the vice and set about coming up with something that imitated that unique action. I didn’t want the fly to pop, skate or slide, but rather have a bait fish profile just below the surface and something just breaking the surface to attract attention. I started by tying a natural-looking brush fly with a bucktail back section and a sculpting-fibre body. I then landed up tying in some shaped foam that I folded back and glued down to the top of the brush fly. Usually, the flydeveloping process requires some trial and error but, in this instance, the fly came out right first time and resulted in the movement I was looking for. As an extra unplanned bonus, the shape of the foam and the glued-in downward slanted eyes resulted in those droplets of water being fritzed when the fly was stripped. Just like a Gilchristella. The fly has consistently produced good fish at Zandvlei and other estuaries. Then Ty tied a Stella for Jono to try on the tigers during a guides’ session on Pongola and it soon became apparent that from species to fisheries this fly had some proper crossover applications.

While I was over the moon to see my Western Cape saltwater patterns do the damage on Africa’s premier freshwater fish, 1 700km away on the other side of South Africa, little did I know that I’d soon be up there too. With some movement in the Mavungana Flyfishing guide roster between their various destinations, I was asked to join the Pongola guide team for the spring season. While I guide a lot in the salt and fresh around Cape Town, I was fritzing like a Gilchristella at the chance.

The start of the season sees us guides putting boats in the water, setting up the war room/office and getting everything ready for six weeks of clients. We have a few days to fish and check things out on the system. Aside from catching a few fish, the main idea is to get the lie of the land and, for newbies, to receive a crash course in learning all the names and locations of spots. There’s a lot to take in. Lake Jozini is a massive body of water, and a large portion of its banks makes up the border between South Africa and Eswatini. The Pongola River flows through Pongola Nature Reserve into Lake Jozini and creates sets of meandering bends, flooded acacia tree structure, phragmites reed beds, islands, rocky points and drop-offs. From a fly-fishing perspective, it’s a dream, because the tigers have so many micro-habitats. From flooded acacia forests holding topwater tigers, to sight casting to open water surface cruisers or shallow mud bank tilapia bed molesters, the fish and this fishery change from day to day as water levels and weather conditions fluctuate. Hell, at times, you even find tigers feeding on dragon flies and sipping on emergers like stillwater trout.

Following Ty and Jono’s success with the Stella, it had become the fly of the autumn season, which had been jampacked with a lot more topwater tiger action than usual. I’d like to think that’s down to the fly, but it was partially because of how the water levels impact this fascinating fishery. Topwater fishing for tigers is nothing new and they had been targeted at Pongola for some time with the usual crease flies, poppers and flippers. There was some success with topwater flies from time to time, but these would commonly be smaller specimens. Although those flies would generate follows and eats, they would seldom convert into good fish being hooked and landed.

Having chatted to Jono about the history of topwater flies on the system, it’s clear there has been an evolution. Past seasons showed that the tigers didn’t enjoy the loud and obnoxious action of a conventional popper. Inroads were made by creating more of a slider action by, for example, attempting to trim down a NYAP (Not Your Average Popper, the Seychelles GT fly created by James Christmas). It seems the Stella arrived at the right stage in that evolution and, with the addition of a weed guard, it proved perfect for targeting the topwater eat.

When I arrived that spring, with the water levels at the highest they have been in a long time, we focused much of our time up in the river inlet area, which sports a plethora of different structure on either side of the river channels. The masses of dead reeds on the water’s edge were holding tigers in super-skinny water. The tactic was, literally, to cast the Stella on to the bank at times and work it back through the reeds. We were finding good fish numbers, good fish sizes and, more importantly, fish that were focused on the surface. Numerous times while clients were fishing subsurface, flies would get taken as they hit the water close to structure. We frequently saw big fish smash bait fish on the surface both deep in the acacia bush structure and in the open water. Fellow guide Mike Dames became a master of spotting “big cruisers”–double-digit fish cruising in open water on the surface. As the weeks progressed, so the conditions changed and we had to adapt and tweak our approach from session to session. When the water levels were high there were new spots to check out and as the levels dropped other spots came into play. While I saw more topwater tiger action with the Stella than I had ever experienced in multiple trips to the Zambezi previously, as the water receded slightly, the crazy surface action up in the dead reeds slowed down. Although we did get got some fish on the Stella, the bite seemed to have changed, which meant that the fly/presentation needed to change too.

At our next break between clients, I tied up a silicone mullet fly in baby tilapia colours on an appropriate tiger fly hook. Originally tied by Bob Popovics, the silicone mullet fly has been around for some time now. It has been used predominantly for saltwater species and in the Cape we fish it for leeries with great success, using an intermediate line to get a subsurface side-to-side action. From my experience targeting leeries, I knew that the silicone mullet provided a more subtle surface action than most topwater flies and seeing as the Stella had worked, I thought it might work nicely for the tigers. It also has a nice squishy feel which I hoped might result in the tigers holding onto it a bit longer, giving anglers a chance to get a better hook set. Armed with the silicone mullet and an intermediate line, Mike and I headed out to test it.

The theory was that I would land the fly close to structure, slide it through the surface film for the first few metres of the retrieve, and then let the line sink and retrieve it subsurface for the rest of the retrieve over the deeper water. It’s a strategy that I have used before for bass fishing from a boat, and it was extremely effective on the tigers. We had a great session pinning more than 20 fish between us. The silicone was working well both on the surface and subsurface. Most of the session was upriver, fishing in the channels of phragmites reeds, but it was towards the end of the session where the topwater potential of the silicone mullet on the surface exploded. At this stage, we were at a section of the dam lined with flooded acacia trees, the perfect structure scenario for fish to hold in. I put the silicone out, landed it next to the structure, gave two strips and slid it over the surface. I then proceeded to light up a ciggie and while I was taking my first drag I witnessed a bus of a fish shoot out of the structure and smash the fly as it sat there static on the surface. I somehow managed to set the hook with one hand holding the rod and line and proceeded to land a solid 13.5lb tiger. With that fish, the silicone fly surface eat was unlocked and from then on, clients and guides fished both it and the Stella with great success.

“And the steamy handlebar moustache?” you might ask. In a recent post, Fly Fishing Nation said, “It seems that fly anglers naturally gravitate towards quirky and odd stuff especially if they have been around for a while.” Whether it’s catching GTs on slip slop bird flies or wearing a pumpkin head while fishing on Halloween, we’ve all seen this go down either in our own circles or leaking out on social media. When you work in a guide team over a season or two, there’s an undercurrent of lunacy that’s almost always there. It makes sense – spend enough time with people in a relatively remote environment away from other distractions and you will develop a language, stories and some dumbass ideas that you just have to execute. Pop culture comes into it too.

Finding new spots at Pongola also meant naming new spots (usually requiring a decent fish to be caught first). Fresh off a Netflix binge during the break between seasons, the Stranger Things theme was running strong with various spots being named things like “The Upside Down” and “Stranger Things”. In my case, Joe Exotic from Tiger King came into play when I took a look in the mirror at the end of the season and saw a somewhat feral chap with lengthy facial hair, a sleeveless camo jacket, trucker cap, long hair and yellow low-light glasses (essentially the whole Joe Exotic wardrobe) staring back at me. Naturally, spurred on by my fellow beard-wielding guides, I trimmed the face fur into a decent set of handle-bars and the Tiger King challenge was set. Now we just needed to get a decent fish while I was in Joe Exotic drag!

Down to our last afternoon session before the end of the season, I was paired up with Jono who will throw topwater over anything, so we both rigged up with topwater silicones. It didn’t take long for him to get a decent fish with the typical explosive eat on the surface. I then had an awesome topwater eat in a love pocket between some acacias but I missed the hook-up. Shortly after that Jono again a had a solid fish molest his silicone which landed up being a 12.5lb beauty, once again breaking his topwater record within the same season. With Jono having had his fill, the pressure was on for me to get a good fish before it was all over. In the back waters, a scenario we keyed into was that where the flooded acacia trees stretched far back to shallow water, there were tilapia nests. Hanging around those nests were big tigers waiting for them to slip up. It truly is an awesome scenario, creeping in on electric motor and being able to cast at sighted tigers in crystal clear, knee-deep water. As we approached one of these areas, we saw a big smash in the shallows and the wake of a few large fish moving around. After quietly getting the boat into position I made a long cast into knee-deep water where we had seen a fish move. I gave three slow strips and a good fish came onto the fly, smashing it on the surface like a bat out of hell! Hooking a fish in these tight confines dotted with acacia trees and submerged islands is one thing, landing it is another. The close-quarter dog fight that ensued was ridiculous, with the fish doing backflips through the trees and making a bee line for every bit of structure in sight, but, with some luck, I managed to get the fish to hand. It wasn’t the biggest fish of the season but at around 8 to 9lb it would suffice for the Tiger King Joe Exotic challenge. What’s more, Jono happened to be filming the whole thing from cast, to eat, to hook-up and fight. So, we got the pic and the video in the last minutes of the session, and of the season. We later found out that, while we were having topwater fly fishing ecstasy, Mike and Ty were also smashing fish up river from us, also having the “best session of their lives” with multiple double-digit fish.

A few days later as I made my way home to Cape Town (where my moustache/mullet combo was to receive some proper side-eyes from my girlfriend and my son), I ran through what had transpired over the last few weeks. With breakthrough fly patterns and tons of fish on surface, in all my years of guiding, it was truly a season to remember. I wasn’t too bleak to be home though, because as the Uber rolled through the home stretch to my house, I could see Zandvlei. It would be a matter of hours, maybe even minutes before I’d be out there throwing Stellas and silicones to baitfish-munching leeries.

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Tigerfish Tag

Working with Adam Wyness - a postdoctoral researcher on the Rivers of Life programmeMavungana Flyfishing has invested heavily in the research and tagging of tigerfish on Lake Jozini. The results of this programme will prove invaluable to assist with future conservation efforts of this special fishery. Find out more at riversoflife.co.za.