Playing bass in the Baviaans
Text and pictures: Edward Truter. Article from the September 2012 issue of Country Life Magazine.
Intrepid flyfishing buddies meet up with bushpig, leopard and baboons in this rugged Eastern Cape kloof
Have been visiting the Baviaanskloof to fish since I was five years old. My first memory is of us pulling off the road to take in the mountains, and then my parents bundling me back into our Land Rover; with gunshots ringing off the krantzes and the sight of two men legging it between distant spekboom clumps. It was something straight out of a Western movie, a thought that lingered after we later met the shooters, who explained that they had been harvesting feral cattle. I remember the farmers’ ruddy-leathered skin and how the ruggedness of the land seemed ploughed into their faces,
But the Baviaans wasn’t made for farming, a sentiment summarised on a rusting sign I once read along the Kloof’s Uniondale road: ‘Ons boer met skuld en geduld’ (We farm with credit and patience).Thirty years later; Eastern Cape Parks manages nearly half a million hectares of state and private land as part of the Baviaanskloof Mega-reserve and it’s better for everyone that way.
Smallmouth bass are the fishing attraction of the Kloof. Little understood outside the few anglers who’ve lucked into getting to know them, smallmouth can be to flyfishing what Bakkies Botha is to rugby – scrappy but keen and bringing a lot to the game. As a North American bass they’re considered alien invaders that gorge on our aquatic biodiversity, which is partly true.
The whole truth though is that, in places like the Baviaanskloof the bass live in the main rivers (the Kouga and Baviaans), while the many tributaries that trickle between quartzite walls are habitable only to populations of indigenous fish. In a world where we play God, altering our environment to suit our needs, it is perhaps a workable compromise, like having our fish cake and eating it.
It all changed in the 1990s, though, when sharptooth catfish (a local and more rampant invader) spread through the catchment. Catfish (aka barbel) will colonise almost anywhere that seems even a little bit damp. Just about wherever they’ve got their whiskers through the door they’re having negative impacts on aquatic life. Nowadays, the quality of Baviaans flyfishing is far from its near world-class status of the 1980s, but the bass appear to be adapting to the catfish and the numbers are up. Regardless, I’ve never stopped going; there’s a lot more in the wildness of the place than just the fishing.
My most recent trip was March 2012. It started off shaky when I received a phone call at 06h30 the day before departure. It came from a hospital cardiac ward and the voice had been told to say that my fishing buddy, Zak wouldn’t be coming as he’d been admitted with his heart racing out of control. ‘Gees, I thought, ‘that’s the first time someone has been so excited to go fishing with me that they ended up in hospital.’ The rest of us did the trip, the Baviaanskloof (Valley of Baboons) welcoming us with splendid summer greenery. The baboons of course had welcoming party plans of another nature.
Returning to her tent after trying her luck in the river, Amanda discovered that what she called the ‘big black monkeys’ had done some breaking and entering
Baboons and people of the tenting type don’t always make for happy camping. A Brazilian student, a town girl from Bahia for whom the Baviaans was another world in every way, was among our group. Returning to her tent after trying her luck in the river; Amanda discovered that what she called the ‘big black monkeys’ had done some breaking and entering.There must have been a few mommy baboons in the mix because stepping through a ripped doorway into the disaster zone, Amanda found her make-up kit had been well sampled, if somewhat untidily.
It was a typically sweaty day in the Kloof, which probably explains why the baboons also emptied the anti-perspirant deodorant. And being weekend and all, I assume our hairy fiends were maybe headed to high tea on the neighbour’s cliff-top deck and, wanting to smell good all-round, they finished off the toothpaste too, I think the mommy baboons found the ‘Rich Coffee’ tone of Amanda’s foundation off-colour though, and doused the tent interior and all her clothes with it in their disappointment. It was a young lady the lighter shade of pale who walked up to us, holding crumpled garments with long fingers and arms outstretched to the max, She asked if any of us had brought washing powder. Rumple-browed we asked, ‘Why?’ Amanda explained that she had learned at school in Brazil that AIDS came from monkeys in Africa and she wasn’t taking any chances.
A sleeping bag lay abandoned in the dust 50 metres from the tent. It was one of those cheap and not-so-fluffy ones from the corner store, certainly not up to scratch as required for rock-hard bush living. My tent did not attract any real attention. Perhaps peaking through the mozzie mesh, the intruders felt the Checkers packet with a tatty jar of camphor cream wasn’t worth the effort.
Three of the Big Five inhabit the Baviaans and, come dark, a lot of things go grunt in the night. I’ve had a leopard pass so close I could hear paws pressing into the sugary, drizzle-dampened sand around my tent. The same sand forms white beaches that are a feature of the Kouga riverbanks. During a rising full moon the valley transforms as each rock face and bright beach is floodlit a different shade of grey It gets bright enough that tying on a fly without torchlight is do-able. On hikes into the Kloof we’ve sometimes lazed around the fire until midnight and then gone down to our camp pool to swish big bugs across the cobblestone shallows. One can’t see the fly at the end of a cast but if you pop it loudly you can fish with your ears. Blooop … balooop … blooop … it will come, me always imagining the hackle feathers froggy-kicking against the moon’s silver mirror and then BOOOF! Be in no doubt that bass hunt at night.
On a recent fishing hike, when my open-air roommates tell me I was cranking out the nasal tunes louder than a bakkie full of the local Working for Water employees chainsawing through the wattle scourge, I was awoken by something charging through the shallows.To be yanked from deep sleep by the sound of hooves clacking on rocks and no idea if it’s coming or going sets the gears in one’s head simultaneously freespooling backwards and forwards and sideways. Before my logic could lock into the picture, a bushpig sort of pranked out of mid-air and onto the ring of white sand in front of where I lay in my sleeping bag. It froze there, stock-legged; I relaxed instantly knowing we weren’t about to be minced by buffalo feet.
I marvelled at how the animal’s greying mane seemed to glow in the moonlight and, when he dashed away, I realised I had one of those life snapshots that will never fade.
Black rhino are in another part of the Kloof but in an area without any fish that will take a fly, so I’ve not had to go anywhere near them.The sandbanks along the river read like a who’s who in the zoo. The criss-crossing spoor of kudu, eland, buffalo, red hartebeest, bushbuck, grysbok, mountain reedbuck, grey duiker klipspringer; leopard, caracal, water mongoose, otters, tortoise, leguaans and others, turn nearly every bare patch of ground into a road map with a story. Snakes like the bright green water snake and the not unspectacular Cape cobra are nearly everyday sightings too – I once caught a Baviaans bass that had just swallowed a snake.
And that’s just the thing. Once in the valley you are in the thick of it and I predict that, after you’ve fished there, the Baviaans will sneak under your skin the way the river sand presses through a stone-rubbed seam into your wading boots, and niggles. You will be able to ignore the call for only so long, It may even become a monkey on your back, just take care that it’s not a big black one trying to steal your Lip-ice.
PS: Zak’s heart was fine; he pitched for the next fishing trip.
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