Still Waters in the Dead of Winter
… from Tom Sutcliffe’s brilliant book, Yet More Sweet Days – Notes from a fly fisher’s life
We left Cape Town just as the first shards of sunlight lit the high mountain that cup the city; the truck’s heater on, the tank full and the coffee flowing. It was midwinter and I was with my friends Darryl Lampert and Chris Bladen, all of us on our third or fourth trip to Highland Lodge, a stillwater venue between Molteno and Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape. The owners, Vicki and Luke Bell, have a few productive lakes and access to a few more on nearby farms.
Nine hundred kilometres later we were driving into Molteno ahead of a setting sun. It was August, a month still hovering with its feet in winter, a month when the landscapes up here are typically bleak and the weather is cold, dry and windy.
Midwinter trips to Highland Lodge are always cold. They lean heavily towards the spartan side of life’s spectrum, in the sense that although the lodge is comfortable and has a wood-burning fireplace and an old AGA stove that warms the kitchen, the days can feel as cold as the Arctic and the nights just get a whole lot worse. At least there’s electricity (until we turn off the generator at 9 pm) and gas-heated hot water in the two bathrooms. But coming across a snowfall in the middle of the Karoo pointed to this trip being even colder than our last one a year or two back. And that was cold, even by Highland Lodge standards. I remember spoons freezing solid in any dregs of coffee left overnight.
But we enjoy the winter fishing up here, because in winter the water is comparatively clear, at least clearer than it is in high summer. The trout are just as big, and there are some real hogs up here, and the fishing is usually good even though the water is cold and the hatches aren’t as abundant as they are in spring or summer. (Perhaps the fishing is good because the water is cold and the hatches aren’t as abundant, so less natural food means the fish are hungrier!)
Bear in mind that the coldest winter temperature in South Africa was recorded on a neighbouring farm. So we also smugly believe our winter battles are harder-won here, and any trout caught is somehow more deserved, no argument.
To get one thing out of the way, the fishing on this trip was superb, even by this lodger’s standards, where the angling is usually on the slow side but productive enough to keep you awake and interested all day. On previous trips here on most days the fishing was one long, dreary battle, punctuated by occasional hookups. I guess what I’m saying is the fishing at Highland Lodge is never consistently hectic. I’m talking here of the winter months – June, July and August. I’ve never done a trip in one of our more traditional still water months, like October or November, when the water is warmer and, I guess, the fishing is a little better.
Then again, much depends on the amount of rain they’ve had, because droughts are not uncommon in this part of the world and once the lakes start losing water and bare earth shows around their edges, the angling falls off. In fact in really bad years I’ve known Vicki and Luke to close their lakes altogether.
The main point about Highland Lodge is that in good seasons you are always in with a chance of catching fish of between seven and ten pounds. There have been years when trout over twelve pounds have been caught but, again, that’s not anything you can bank on happening more than just occasionally. The mere fact that it is on the cards though adds a nice edge of anticipation to every cast you make, and probably accounts for why we stay out fishing until the sun sinks below the hills when, by loose medical criteria, we are probably hovering on the fringes of hypothermia.
When we arrived at the lodge on this trip, the snow had followed us from Graaff-Reinet. Hilltops were capped white, and the branches of the old pine trees around the house sagged under the weight of the snow. Vicki said more bad weather was on the way, and added that she and Luke had been snowed in for a week before we arrived, unable to move out of their house.
So we geared up in the usual midwinter Highland Lodge way, meaning we wore multiple layers of technical clothing, fleece-lined gloves, beanies, UV-protecting buffs, and chest waders with chest straps locked tight. Our float tubes were pumped to just the right pressure for the icy weather, and we all carried on-board flasks of hot coffee or soup. It’s a performance. By the time we get everything done we somehow feel that when we do eventually hook and land a fish we deserve it – more than any trout caught wading a small stream with a light stick on a sunny day.
We’ve built up something of a routine to our fishing on these trips, and now it’s almost cast in stone. We leave the house after a good breakfast, each with a thermos of coffee and maybe a few biscuits, then come back for a late brunch, boil up more coffee or maybe soup, add a roll or two, then go out again, possibly changing from one lake to another depending on how we’re doing. We press on until the sun starts to sag, then pack up in the last of its light. It’s usually dark when we’re done.
During the day we beach our tubes for regular breaks to warm up, fix rigs, and change flies, always sitting in the lee of a vehicle if there’s a wind blowing, and on most days there is. Often we need to add air to the tubes because they soften as the temperature drops. We sip hot coffee, maybe snack on something, check leaders and tippets, and always interrogate strategies. We scroll through the LCD screens on our cameras to see what pictures we got right – or, with the underwater shots, more often where we got things horribly wrong, because, to the last, we are all SLR fans.
By the time the sun has dropped and we’ve beached (never before) we are sipping sherry or adding a dram of whisky to our coffee. It feels more like a necessity than a pleasant ritual. In the end someone will lift the float tubes onto the truck’s roof racks and secure them with rope. We leave our small forest of fly rods set up and carefully tie them down on the soft surface of a float tube, then head home hoping to not be the guy who has to get out to open and close the gates.
Back at the lodge we set up the rods in a safe corner of the lounge, hang our waders off a curtain rail and lean our float tubes against the wall in the dining room so they don’t freeze solid overnight.
Then we light the log fire, pull off wet waders, shed damp clothing, and get into a pair of sheepskin slippers. Someone pours drinks, and two or more of us will be on kitchen duty preparing the evening meal – mostly a simple stew or a hot, filling, pasta. And always with plenty of buttered bread and maybe a salad. The dining room table is cleared of fly tying stuff and prepared for the meal.
Before going to bed we boil water on the stove in a huge battered kettle, fill hot-water bottles from it, pull on headlamps, turn off the generator and hit the sack wearing as many layers of night clothes as we can fit into. By then the temperature will be minus something. In fact it’s often around -10°C.
The details on trips like this tend to blur when it comes to catching trout, unless you’re keeping a diary – which I wasn’t, at least not in the strict sense. But in the final analysis it would be fair to say we caught a heap of lovely fish, all but one of them rainbows. The brown trout here are mostly confined to Bernard’s, a large lake around 3 kilometres from the lodge.
When you fish for six days on the trot and end up being uncertain what day of the week it is, all you remember later are the highlights, and that often boils down to a few fish that were memorable for one reason or another, and not just because they happened to be big. On this trip, the snow around the house helped to make the trip memorable, and we put it to good use with our cameras . Another notable thing about this trip was the dunking of two seriously expensive cameras and lenses in one day.
The final theme of this trip, which was particularly cold and harsh even by Highland Lodge standards, with winds that cut through our jackets like ice nails, was an expression Chris came up with, a statement that had to be viewed in the dire circumstances of the weather. The version edited for younger readers was: “Hey … harden up a little!”
Picture the scene. We would arrive back at night frozen to the bone, and someone might complain a bit about having to haul ice-covered float tubes off the truck, and Chris would quickly be in with his chirp: “Hey … harden up a little!”
I do remember one fish from this particular visit among the many I was lucky to land. It happened to be the first fish of the day on the first day of the trip. We had all just launched and were bobbing out in the bay on the northern edge of Spurwing, a large lake a kilometre from the lodge. The water was clear, and the wind was strong enough to put a smooth swell on the surface and make my kick-boat rock gently.
I’d set up my default stillwater rig – the product of habit, laziness, and some empirical experience. It has worked for years more often than not, and when it does work it’s more fun than catching a fish on a fast-stripped streamer on a sinking line. It boils down to a 5-weight floating line, a 12 foot leader, 3 feet of 3X fluorocarbon tippet with a size 12 neutral density Red-Eyed Dragonfly Nymph on the end, meaning the fly is unweighted but has an underbody of wool that gradually soaks up water so you can control the sink rate. When you squeeze water out of the fly it’s fairly buoyant; when it’s soaked it sinks, but not unnaturally fast.
I was in water about two metres deep. Scattered islands of weed showed up at the surface. From where I was sitting the lake ran from the far shore towards me in a long ever- deepening slope of water laced with weed-beds. It was the sort of place to position yourself to intercept trout traffic coming in from deeper water to feed in the shallows, or perhaps the other way round; I’m not sure that it matters.
I had made a few casts and was settling in, adjusting and arranging various items around me and making myself comfortable. I had brought along a small canoe-shaped inflatable craft for transporting my camera and lenses, and it was tied to the left of my float tube. I could see already that the lightness of this craft was going to be a problem. I kept having to readjust the attachment to the tube to prevent the wind swinging it around in front of me.
In the end I worked it all out and fished the water in a fan-shape spread of casts with my back to the wind and the anchor holding. That’s when I saw a decent-sized fish swim up lazily to within a foot of the surface, then slowly turn and sink, moving from my left to my right about five metres away, leaving a small dome-shaped depression in the water. It was as clear as daylight.
The trout had obviously taken something just below the surface. It’s not often in a lake that you get to see sub-surface feeding like this so clearly. I gently lifted my fly line and dropped the nymph two metres ahead of the fish’s path and let it sink. The leader winked with light as the fly slowly drifted down. I steeled myself to not retrieve too early.
When I imagined the fly was around a metre deep I straightened the leader until the fly line was moving, then gently lifted the rod tip in a slow, even, upward arc, dropped the tip once more, then lifted again. I actually saw the fish take the fly just a foot beneath the surface and not more than four metres from me.
It was a deliciously strong visceral pull that you instantly know is a good, well-hooked fish. To my delight it turned and made straight for the deep water. The fight was first the long, dogged, far-out head-shaking struggle that I thought was a cock fish. But then it ran and left the water in gorgeous leaps.
In the net my trout was a green-backed hen fish with red flanks and gill plates as bright as a sunset. It was not quite 7 pounds, but near enough not to matter. It was the way the fish had started my trip that mattered more.
At this same spot a day or two later Gerrit, with his 7D Canon camera around his neck, was leaning forward to net a fish when a gust of wind got under the back of his float tube and upended it, depositing him and his camera into the water. Fortunately, he was only a metre or two from the shoreline where it was shallow enough for him to get onto his feet and not have to swim in with the water at about 8°C. It was a sobering lesson to keep in mind the next time you lean forward in your float tube with your back to a strong wind.
One morning the wind blew so strongly that it pulled up my anchor often enough to become an irritation. Yet we caught a heap of good fish, Gerrit’s the best being close to 10 lb. There is something about high winds on lakes that it often seems to improve the fishing. It’s a combination of things. The wave action dislodges nymphs from weed beds, high winds blow terrestrials onto the water, and waves add oxygen. Finally, to help shore up my hypothesis, trout feeding at the surface in choppy conditions have more cover from predators. You want to fish the windward shoreline though. Whatever, you don’t want to miss out fishing a lake because the wind is too fierce.
We could start a serious discourse about hot spots on lakes and say that they exist because that’s where fish like hanging out, or they exist because that’s where anglers have been told most fish are caught so they fish them to exclusion. Given the laws of probability, the more anglers fish a so-called hotspot the more likely they will catch fish there and perpetuate the conviction that they were right. But on balance I’m a firm believer that trout, too, like certain spots in a lake, even if we can’t always understand why, though the availability of food must be a commonality.
It’s a topic that reminds me of an interview I once watched years back on television, in which a lady psychologist was trying to get behind a hardened bank robber’s inner thinking. After a long discussion she finally wrapped up by asking the most telling question of the whole show. Leaning forward and looking very serious, she asked: “So Fred, tell us – why do you rob banks?” And he replied, straight faced: “Well, lady, because that’s where they keep the money.”
In general though, hotspots are the places of interface: where deep water meets shallow; along the rocky edges of the wall; where weeds abut clear water; where deep water is backed by reeds; where stony outcrops drop off into depth; where quick water meets still water, as at inlets; or where the water is cooler, say at a particular depth; or less commonly, where an underground spring comes into a lake.
So it was that we came to like the pier on Spurwing, fishing the two bays each side of it or the deeper gutters straight ahead of the pier, from tubes or off the bank – it didn’t seem to matter.
There was an afternoon on Spurwing when Chris and I took a few trout from the bank. It was an ice-cold cloudless day, but the sun was warm on our backs. We found a promontory – a narrow slice of land just beyond the wall that ran 20 metres out from the shoreline. On either side there was a lovely expanse of water with large bottle green holes edged with walls of thick weed. It looked like a perfect holding water, and Chris and I both believe we know the real thing when we see it.
Sometimes we’re right, and a good-looking stretch produces fish and confirms our faith in our ability to be the hunter-gatherers nature intended. But sometimes we fail, mostly, if not always, for reasons we don’t fully understand. I’ve learned that no matter how good a piece of water looks, how good the day is, whatever the reputation of the water, a large slice of what will happen when you fish it is in the lap of the gods. Or, put differently, it’s only decided when you finally put a fly in the water.
We were to leave the next day and I’d say it was one of the coldest nights I can remember up here. We took time that evening to pack up, then prepared an eclectic mix for dinner from most of whatever was left over. We drained a few bottles of wine and staggered to bed far later than usual. Needless to say we didn’t leave on schedule the next morning.