UV colours for trout – fact or fallacy?
UV colours for trout – fact or fallacy? There has been a lot of talk about UV dubbing and the use of UV crystal flash in flies for trout (and many other fish species). I started using UV colours a number of years ago after Mark Krige insisted that flies containing materials reflecting UV light […]
A RIPPLE OF EXCITEMENT
A RIPPLE OF EXCITEMENT Tired of flies falling around in your foam fly box? I definitely was (especially after losing plenty flies carrying cheap polystyrene boxes in my pocket) until I got handed the Ripplebox. Sceptic as always about new products and new concepts, like the silicone ‘ripple’ keeping flies in place in this new UK […]
ONE LAST TASTE…
“How can this be happening…” “And all this because people still eat weird shit” “How can one even begin to consider eating bats, civets, pangolins…Or monkeys!? Immoral meat, that’s what it should be called, immoral meat and it should be banned everywhere in the world” I gripped a thin, sharp but dusty edge with my […]
Flies for Iranian barbs
It is always a nightmare preparing a fly box for a foreign destination, especially if there’s a severe lack of internet information about the place and fishes that live there. This was the case when we recently found ourselves, Ewan Naude, Gerald Penkler and me, tying flies for ‘yellowfishes’ that live in Iran. We were […]
Hasta la Vista, Jimmy
It was judgment day, Jimmy had a week left in the South before he had to leave on assignment to fight metal off Angola’s coast and it was the last day on which we could hunt together before the fronts came. He got word from the resistance in the West that the uprising had arrived; […]
A grunter theory
South African spotted grunter has been one of the most praised, loved, frustrating, and hated fish, all at once, by the greater community and even individuals (like me) targeting these fish on fly tackle. It is not a fish that many (if any?) have caught on their first try. The odds have changed slightly with […]
Grunter premonition
This short piece on catch and release fly fishing in our estuaries was published on the Red Bull website: While studying the giant mud prawn Ewan had a premonition of imminent chaos, that a spotted grunter would eat his Clouser Minnow. I agreed that his olive Clouser could be mistaken for the prawn by a hungry […]
Good Vibrations – the Sperm Clouser
So it’s old (and legendary) news that Bob Clouser designed the Clouser Minnow; but Bob also combined synthetics with buck tail in his flies and according to Clouser Flyfishing he settled on the combination of buck tail and Steve Farrar’s (SF) Flash Blend in his ‘best’ flies. The reason given in the description of this ‘Wild Hybrid […]
