CANE & ABLE

ONE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S MOST RESPECTED BAMBOO ROD BUILDERS, ARCHITECT STEPHEN DUGMORE (FREESTONERODS.CO.ZA), ON HIS CLOWNING CAREER, HIS BAMBOO GAME, AND WHERE JACK KEROUAC GOT IT WRONG.

The first fish I remember “catching”, I hate to admit, was a “goldfish” (probably a rare koi) which, to my surprise, I speared with an absentmindedly thrown reed in the Japanese gardens in Durban. The first fish caught with line and hook was either a trout or a bream. I was around five at the time. The bream I caught with my uncle in Zimbabwe in a dam somewhere outside Bulawayo. We caught them on worms dug up in the garden that we suspended under a pencil float, thrown into a spot that had been recently chummed. They came out in their dozens. The trout was caught at a dam at Dirksen’s hatchery in Dullstroom, with a terrible-looking Walkers Killer nymph on a tippetless leader that had been progressively shortened to the point where it barely passed through the eye of the hook.

I’ve called three places home: Johannesburg on three different occasions, Kloof in KwaZulu-Natal between two Joburg sojourns, and Cape Town on two occasions, one of which is current. It was as much of a whirlwind as that suggests.

Jobs I’ve held include being a clown in Garlicks department store (fortunately of very short duration); the first-ever (I think) male chambermaid (and waiter) in a hotel in Sidmouth in the south of England; a maths textbook illustrator; a part-time design lecturer/studio master in the Architecture department at the University of Cape Town and currently, an architect.

With my two kids now grown up, a typical day no longer involves school lifts. My wife and I have an architectural studio attached to our house so we start work at eightish (earlier if there are deadlines) after coffee/tea in the garden. The working day is spent designing, drawing, doing admin, seeing clients, visiting sites. My wife and I do tai chi one morning and I play hockey and/or tennis two or three evenings in the week. I walk the dog in the forest with my wife every other evening. In winter I try to get in an early morning surf.

The Du Toitskloof streams have been my home waters for 44 years. More recently it has been the Upper Olifants in the Witzenberg Valley where we had access to some very special brown trout water.

I fish on my 20-odd bamboo rods on both streams and in estuaries, except when throwing big flies. Bamboo is a wonderfully sensitive material in lighter line weights (000-5-weight) and rod lengths up to around 8ft max. It is a real treat to fish bamboo as each rod is a character. Bamboo can, however, get a bit heavy in hand for a long day’s fishing with heavier lines (6-weight+) and longer rods (8’6”+). So I go to graphite for those occasions.

The best advice I have ever been given is that there is an ebb and a flow in the tide of human relations.

I am most proud of having found the wife I have. Otherwise, I have moments of pride rather than being proud of a single thing. I do believe pride comes before a fall so I try to keep it in check as best I can.

The best party trick I have ever seen is not really a trick. I spent one evening around a campfire at Victoria Falls on a full moon with some Deadheads (Grateful Dead followers) I’d met there. One of them was a gifted storyteller who had us enthralled, mesmerised and intermittently in hysterics for hours with an incredible evening of storytelling.

I have had to work really hard at trying to play a musical instrument. I don’t have a good ear but can, at least, now entertain myself on the guitar. I started playing when in a plaster cast and boot for months after snapping my Achilles tendon.

I find 3D spatial visualisation and implementation comes naturally. Good thing, since my profession as an architect is about exactly that.

The most satisfying fish I ever caught was a 16in fish high up the Jan du Toits River that I spent at least two hours working on. It was in a tricky lie that required a very precise cast at a precise moment. I have spent rapt hours alone and with others pursuing individual fish on that stream.

One place I have to return to is Mdumbi on the Wild Coast, where there’s an incredible surfing wave and great fishing off the rocks.

I got into bamboo rods when I was a kid and my dad gave me a 7ft 4-weight Walker Bampton that I loved to fish. It was a dreamy, smooth casting rod (I later worked out it was based on a Garrison Taper). I had, however, picked up a bad habit of inverting my first (fibreglass) rod and pulling down branches in which I had lodged my fly with the reel. While bamboo is a tough material, the leverage on a fine tip was retrospectively, and predictably, too much for this ingenuity. Tragically, it broke. I tried to fix it with a fibreglass sleeve, but the action was lost. In 2004 I found it again and wondered if I could fix it properly. After some research, it became clear that it would take almost as much work to fix as to make a new one. So I decided to make a new rod and pilfered the components. In the process I got hooked on the design opportunities of rod actions and the tapers that define them. This started a quest for the ultimate stream rod. The quest is, however, a bit like that for the Holy Grail – something never to be found and, in the end, all about the journey.

It is OK for an angler to lie when you know the truth will be misused. For example, telling someone where a good fish lies when you know they would kill it if they caught it.

The handiest survival skill I have is that I am pretty adept at problem solving with limited available materials. Cable ties, duct tape, epoxy glue and a Leatherman go a long way. And fishing line is a remarkably useful material (besides for catching fish).

As far as skill mastery goes, I am still working on playing the guitar. I would love to master it but that is not remotely a possibility. There is not much, I think, that can be “mastered” in a lifetime, especially if you have jack-of-alltrade interests.

The biggest adventure I’ve ever been on was when I hitchhiked up from Cape Town through Botswana into Zimbabwe and back down again with two good friends. There are so many stories to tell from that trip!

The best way to face one’s fears is cautiously… and with your back half-turned.

Before I die I want to find peace. I would also love to do an Indian Ocean atoll fishing trip. The problem is I suspect they may be mutually exclusive unless the latter just somehow happens.

Some of what I get out of fly fishing has changed over the years and some hasn’t. The biggest kick is still just spending time in the generally amazing places that trout like to be. My fishing focus used to be on catching lots, then catching the biggest, then catching difficult fish, and now I also get pleasure out of simply watching others fish. But I can only do that for so long before I need to feel the pure pleasure of casting a line to a sighted and feeding fish.

I think the variety in fly fishing techniques, locations, species targeted, etc is wonderful. It would be great if the fly-fishing community could also be more varied and diverse. This is a systemic problem in South Africa with our entrenched inequalities that will only really be properly solved when we can break them down. We are, I think, making progress but it feels like one step forward two steps back, and then shoot yourself in the foot.

Looking back on my life, there are too many things I wish I had done differently but I accept that I can’t change the past. We only have “now” and the now shapes the future, so best to go with that.

Something I have changed my mind about is that I no longer think that Jack Kerouac was correct in his belief in the “only people”:

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” Jack Kerouac, On

The Road

The last fish I caught was a 65cm leervis last week in the dying light of the day.