Gin-clear water. Sight-fishing. Dry fly heaven. These are terms familiar to anyone who regularly fishes the Bokong but are in complete contrast to the challenging conditions we have had for the last few days. A more accurate description of the last few days here would include terms like “monsoon”, “sludge” and “chocolate”. So what do...
The Lesotho highlands are a very far cry from the Miombo Woodlands of Zambia and Zimbabwe, and so the wilderness-hardened Southern African guests arrived with slack-jawed, breathless cries of “Mushe!” which I believe is Zimbabwean for “hectic”, “aweh” or “lekker!”. Unfortunately, they also arrived to a river that was completely brown after a serious overnight...
There are very few fairytales while Tiger fishing in Tanzania. It is completely true that taking an opportunity to fly fish for tigers on the Mnyera and Ruhudji rivers is to live out a fairytale, but when it comes to the actual landing of dream quality fish, the Tigers generally depart sharply from anything resembling...
We were joined this week by a mixed group of anglers from South Africa, Ireland, and the USA. The guys were eager to hit both rivers on fly & conventional, but the river gods had other ideas in store for us. A big flush of cold dirty water came down the Ruhudji and forced both...
The last week of the 2021 season was a tough one, unexpected heavy rains unfortunately lifted the river level extremely high followed by brown water making the conditions far from ideal. Despite this the team set of with Tom and Gary from the USA in search of large mouth and small mouth yellows. The morning...
Before going to Tanzania, I had never even considered the possibility of successfully targeting any species of Distichodus on fly. However, this changed quickly once I arrived on the Ruhudji river for our Tigerfish season this year. Distichodus petersii (ndungu) are a large, vegetarian/fruit-eating species and are abundant when the right conditions present themselves along...
With the sun slowly rising above the horizon in a glowing red ball, a pair of African fish eagles greet the new morning with their echoing duet from the branches of a massive sycamore fig growing out of the bank of the Ruhudji river. At the same time our guests sit around the morning fire,...
Following the success of the previous weeks guide drift the team set out for the seventh drift of the season feeling very confident. First time guests to African Waters André, Charles, Trevor and Matt arrived with huge levels of excitement as it was all of their first time fishing the beautiful orange river. Night one...
The last week of September marked the end of our second stint for the season on the Lower Orange River. This gifted the guides with some valuable time off, before the next guests arrival, to prospect the river and enjoy some down time. Coupled with this opportunity, the weather seemed to finally stabilise and show...
As the halfway mark through our season neared, the guides were in high spirits for the coming week as the conditions were looking pristine! The clarity had certainly improved despite the constant, weekly, fluctuations. Initially the week started slowly with fish sitting deep, reluctant to commit. As the week progressed, we noticed the fish eating...
