What is it that brings me back year after year to slog the waters of the North Eastern Cape in an event instigated by the Wild Trout Association?
Twenty years ago it seemed to present the opportunity to meet some of the faces that I had only seen in glossy fly-fishing magazines – perhaps to fuel a little harmless name-dropping? That wouldn’t work though since all my friends back home in Port Elizabeth already thought I was mentally challenged. Why travel over six hundred kilometres to go fishing when I live a hundred and fifty metres from the Indian Ocean. What was more puzzling to them was that I always returned home with nothing more than a smile and a depleted bank balance – never a fish! No, name-dropping would be a waste of time, most felt that there should be some sort of treatment for my affliction.
Was it that the festival would offer an opportunity to learn from the legends of the sport and improve my somewhat inept skills, I had been told that these guys were always ready to share their years of skills with us lesser mortals.
Was it the magnificently rugged and wild mountain scenery, the idyllic streams, the uncompromising and often frightening changes in the weather, the white water torrents that often followed. The roads which turned from dust to mud in just a few minutes during one of those majestic thunderstorms. The nipping of the proverbial straws when you realise how fast the streams were turning into rivers and you start to count the number of sloots there are between you and home.
The answer to all of these questions has to be a qualified “yes”. Over a number of years I had already experienced the magnificence of the North Eastern Cape, my wife and I had bought a cottage in Barkly a couple of years before and I had fished the area extensively.
So what is the real reason I keep returning to the festival? Simple, PEOPLE. All my most memorable fly-fishing experiences have been created by people, without whom my angling would have been reduced to a tally in a log book – statistics! I keep returning to meet up again with friends I only see once a year, and yet it is an enduring friendship which forms, it always amazes me how after an interval of twelve months we take up where we left off a year before. We have talked, we have fished, we have driven hundreds of kilometres together. I have learned a little more about fly-fishing and a great deal about people, whilst reminiscing of time gone by and of times to come, all embellished with bullxxxx and liberal quantities of alcoholic libation.
I have rarely experienced the feelings of genuine friendship generated by intermittent fellowship after such an extended period of time.
Looking back on these past twenty years I remain so grateful to these friends who have richly contributed to my life experience. As I grow more ancient I am reminded of an adage which seems to sum up this twenty year passage of time:
Inside every seventy-year-old is a thirty-five-year-old who keeps asking “Did all of this really happen?”
Here’s to the next twenty!