On Tuesday, Bradley Baatjes and myself headed off to Le
Bonheur crocodile farm for a spot of bass bashing on the fly line. The day
started off wind still, partly cloudy and warm and then rapidly climbed to
34degrees Celsius. This had the effect of galvanizing the Nile tilapia into
feeding machines. It was amazing to see the usually shy tilapia chasing bass
flies. Because of this I decided to change tactics from bass flies to smaller
tilapia friendly patterns.
The change was rewarded by tilapia nipping at my white Sean's minnow in size 10 and it took me a little while to get the retrieve right in order to hook one. This took about half an hour of trial and error. It was very interesting to see the tilapia actually feeding in the clear water. They where swimming in small schools and you could see the mouths working obviously eating very small items of food. My first tilapia was about 20cm and gave a very good account of itself. Unfortunately, like a real bright spark, I remembered to take my camera with me, I even remembered the batteries but forgot to include the SD card. Eish.... This meant that I was restricted to using the meager internal memory of the camera. By reducing the megapixels from 10 to 3 I was able to take 7images before filling up the memory.... Eish....
So as I caught bigger or more worthy fish, I had to delete smaller fish off the camera... Not ideal... Lesson learnt. I hope...
The retrieve that worked was a very sharp and snappy pull, pull, pull, pausssssssse for the tilapia to catch up to the fly, then wait for it to hopefully inhale it enough for me to strike. I missed quite a few fish. Some large and some small. I noticed a few fish feeding on the surface and changed over to # 12 foam hopper. I cast this continually close to rises and was rewarded with two tilapia to 25cm. I noticed a particularly large kurper feeding on something subsurface and changed to a soft hackle pattern. This was eventually inhaled by the tilapia no less than three times, and I missed it on the strike every time... It did result in a further 2 smaller tilapia. In between the tilapia, I was hooking into small bass. Always fun.. Bradley had moved over to the far side of the lake and latched onto a few smaller bass. It was very hot at this stage and so I sat down in the shade and had some water and a yogurt to cool down.
I made my way around to the far side and waded out among some reed beds to a promising looking spot. I tied on a #6 frizz fry (one of my own killer bass flies) in white with a red head. There was extensive weed beds at this spot and I had already spotted some larger bass in some of the gaps. The frizz fry is tied using frizz fibre (which is a very soft, translucent material sold by h2O products) and has no weight, so it sinks very slowly, almost suspending. This particular version had larger dolls eyes which gave it a subtle rattle and made it sink even slower. It has an extremely erratic way of swimming on the retrieve and is one of my most successful bass flies by far. I targeted one of the bass that I could see about 4 meters out and on the third retrieve was rewarded by a take. The bass fought very hard and I soon had it subdued on my 5 weight Temple Fork Outfitters, Jim Teeny rod. I was using a 6 weight Airflo Ridge line that I find very good for bass fishing because of its lack of stretch and ease of casting. My leader was self tied using 1 meter of Maxima .45mm line with 30cm of .35mm maxima tied to this. I tie a loop knot in the end of this piece and add 1 meter of .25mm Maxima Ultragreen as my tippet. The fly is tied on using a loop knot to increase the erratic action that it has.
Casting further out in between the patches of weed resulted in some explosive action as bass somersaulted on the frizz fry which I could clearly see swimming just subsurface. These frizz fry flies are the next best thing to using a popper as the fishing is so visual and you can often see the wake of the bass coming to intercept your fly... Exciting stuff. I started hooking into a few smallmouth bass in addition to the largemouth's. The biggest smallmouth was a respectable size and gave me very hard time.
Bradley called me to show me a tilapia that he had just landed, his first. It was a good size and he was chuffed.
I targeted more bass as I went along and caught a lot of smaller specimens with the odd 30cm bass in between to keep things interesting. When I made it to the dam wall I started noticing larger bass and tilapia. I spotted a very large Nile tilapia and cast a blue gill coloured frizz fry at it just to see what it would do. As the fly was sinking slowly, I noticed the tilapia edging forward to inspect it and then was amazed to see it inhale the whole fly. I set the hook and was fast into a very, very angry tilapia. These fish are very powerful. Fortunately my many years of subduing large carp on fly rods came into play and I had the fish under control in relatively short order. I lip landed the fish and hauled it out onto dry land. It measured 45cm.... Awesome...
A little while later I came to an area of thicker weed and I noticed some agitated water with some very nervous fry. As the fry swam over a hole in the thick weed covered with algae, a large bass jumped out and landed on the weed before heading back into its hole, the school of fry having lost a member or two... I cast the frizz fry out and twitched it over the spot where the attack happened. Nothing. So I cast out again and this time the bass again launched out of the water with the friz fry firmly clamped in its huge mouth, I was reminded of a scene from Air jaws (the documentary on great white sharks that hunt seals at Seal Island by launching themselves out of the water...) This was a larger bass and I had to play it hard at close quarters using a 5 weight rod... Heart stopping stuff. I love bass fishing.... I was very relieved when I was able to lip land it. I was able to take two photos of it after deleting a few smaller bass of my cameras memory. It was 46cm long and quite hefty. Probably close to 2kg in weight.
I met up again with Bradley and we decided to have lunch at Le Bonheur. The food was very reasonable and was very tasted very tasty. Bradley had a cheese burger and I opted for a toasted cheese and tomato which came with chips. The ice cold coke went down singing hymns....
We decided to give the Berg river in Paarl a bash for some smallmouth bass and carp.
The first spot that we tried in the centre of town had some carp but the water was flowing very strongly for this time of the year. We used heavily weighted carp fritz flies. This is the section of river that is featured in my excellent DVD (The Ultimate Guide To Fly Fishing For Carp) Not many where feeding and despite having a few takes, we hooked none. A little further down, underneath a road bridge, we started hooking into smallmouth bass, of the miniature variety, which despite their small size, gave very good accounts of themselves. At this point I know that many of you reading this will have this idea in your heads of pristine surroundings and crystal clear water filled with fly snaffling hard fighting fish. Let me just set you right.. We don't call this section of the river the Bergie river for nothing. Litter, submerged shopping trolleys and human excrement where reminders that this is the centre of town. If you want pristine, then fish the Berg higher up near Franshoek. There are fewer carp up there but more trout and bass and ironically, less public access... One thing that I have noticed is that the water quality has improved by leaps and bounds since the Berg river dam was built a few years ago. I am sure that there are more trout lower down in this river these days.
A bit later and we headed off to the N1 bridge and fished underneath it. I hooked a large (for this river) smallmouth bass on a tungsten beaded black woolly bugger in size 10 which pulled my arm off (well nearly). It is amazing how much bigger these river smallmouth bass look underwater and then how they seem to shrink in size when you land them... I also landed a few smaller bass in a long run a bit lower down before we called it quits at 5pm. I ended the day with 24 largemouth bass, 9 smallmouth bass and 6 Nile tilapia. All in all a brilliant day.
The frizz fry and methods used in this short article will appear shortly in an E book that I am working on. Watch this space....
The change was rewarded by tilapia nipping at my white Sean's minnow in size 10 and it took me a little while to get the retrieve right in order to hook one. This took about half an hour of trial and error. It was very interesting to see the tilapia actually feeding in the clear water. They where swimming in small schools and you could see the mouths working obviously eating very small items of food. My first tilapia was about 20cm and gave a very good account of itself. Unfortunately, like a real bright spark, I remembered to take my camera with me, I even remembered the batteries but forgot to include the SD card. Eish.... This meant that I was restricted to using the meager internal memory of the camera. By reducing the megapixels from 10 to 3 I was able to take 7images before filling up the memory.... Eish....
So as I caught bigger or more worthy fish, I had to delete smaller fish off the camera... Not ideal... Lesson learnt. I hope...
The retrieve that worked was a very sharp and snappy pull, pull, pull, pausssssssse for the tilapia to catch up to the fly, then wait for it to hopefully inhale it enough for me to strike. I missed quite a few fish. Some large and some small. I noticed a few fish feeding on the surface and changed over to # 12 foam hopper. I cast this continually close to rises and was rewarded with two tilapia to 25cm. I noticed a particularly large kurper feeding on something subsurface and changed to a soft hackle pattern. This was eventually inhaled by the tilapia no less than three times, and I missed it on the strike every time... It did result in a further 2 smaller tilapia. In between the tilapia, I was hooking into small bass. Always fun.. Bradley had moved over to the far side of the lake and latched onto a few smaller bass. It was very hot at this stage and so I sat down in the shade and had some water and a yogurt to cool down.
I made my way around to the far side and waded out among some reed beds to a promising looking spot. I tied on a #6 frizz fry (one of my own killer bass flies) in white with a red head. There was extensive weed beds at this spot and I had already spotted some larger bass in some of the gaps. The frizz fry is tied using frizz fibre (which is a very soft, translucent material sold by h2O products) and has no weight, so it sinks very slowly, almost suspending. This particular version had larger dolls eyes which gave it a subtle rattle and made it sink even slower. It has an extremely erratic way of swimming on the retrieve and is one of my most successful bass flies by far. I targeted one of the bass that I could see about 4 meters out and on the third retrieve was rewarded by a take. The bass fought very hard and I soon had it subdued on my 5 weight Temple Fork Outfitters, Jim Teeny rod. I was using a 6 weight Airflo Ridge line that I find very good for bass fishing because of its lack of stretch and ease of casting. My leader was self tied using 1 meter of Maxima .45mm line with 30cm of .35mm maxima tied to this. I tie a loop knot in the end of this piece and add 1 meter of .25mm Maxima Ultragreen as my tippet. The fly is tied on using a loop knot to increase the erratic action that it has.
Casting further out in between the patches of weed resulted in some explosive action as bass somersaulted on the frizz fry which I could clearly see swimming just subsurface. These frizz fry flies are the next best thing to using a popper as the fishing is so visual and you can often see the wake of the bass coming to intercept your fly... Exciting stuff. I started hooking into a few smallmouth bass in addition to the largemouth's. The biggest smallmouth was a respectable size and gave me very hard time.
Bradley called me to show me a tilapia that he had just landed, his first. It was a good size and he was chuffed.
I targeted more bass as I went along and caught a lot of smaller specimens with the odd 30cm bass in between to keep things interesting. When I made it to the dam wall I started noticing larger bass and tilapia. I spotted a very large Nile tilapia and cast a blue gill coloured frizz fry at it just to see what it would do. As the fly was sinking slowly, I noticed the tilapia edging forward to inspect it and then was amazed to see it inhale the whole fly. I set the hook and was fast into a very, very angry tilapia. These fish are very powerful. Fortunately my many years of subduing large carp on fly rods came into play and I had the fish under control in relatively short order. I lip landed the fish and hauled it out onto dry land. It measured 45cm.... Awesome...
A little while later I came to an area of thicker weed and I noticed some agitated water with some very nervous fry. As the fry swam over a hole in the thick weed covered with algae, a large bass jumped out and landed on the weed before heading back into its hole, the school of fry having lost a member or two... I cast the frizz fry out and twitched it over the spot where the attack happened. Nothing. So I cast out again and this time the bass again launched out of the water with the friz fry firmly clamped in its huge mouth, I was reminded of a scene from Air jaws (the documentary on great white sharks that hunt seals at Seal Island by launching themselves out of the water...) This was a larger bass and I had to play it hard at close quarters using a 5 weight rod... Heart stopping stuff. I love bass fishing.... I was very relieved when I was able to lip land it. I was able to take two photos of it after deleting a few smaller bass of my cameras memory. It was 46cm long and quite hefty. Probably close to 2kg in weight.
I met up again with Bradley and we decided to have lunch at Le Bonheur. The food was very reasonable and was very tasted very tasty. Bradley had a cheese burger and I opted for a toasted cheese and tomato which came with chips. The ice cold coke went down singing hymns....
We decided to give the Berg river in Paarl a bash for some smallmouth bass and carp.
The first spot that we tried in the centre of town had some carp but the water was flowing very strongly for this time of the year. We used heavily weighted carp fritz flies. This is the section of river that is featured in my excellent DVD (The Ultimate Guide To Fly Fishing For Carp) Not many where feeding and despite having a few takes, we hooked none. A little further down, underneath a road bridge, we started hooking into smallmouth bass, of the miniature variety, which despite their small size, gave very good accounts of themselves. At this point I know that many of you reading this will have this idea in your heads of pristine surroundings and crystal clear water filled with fly snaffling hard fighting fish. Let me just set you right.. We don't call this section of the river the Bergie river for nothing. Litter, submerged shopping trolleys and human excrement where reminders that this is the centre of town. If you want pristine, then fish the Berg higher up near Franshoek. There are fewer carp up there but more trout and bass and ironically, less public access... One thing that I have noticed is that the water quality has improved by leaps and bounds since the Berg river dam was built a few years ago. I am sure that there are more trout lower down in this river these days.
A bit later and we headed off to the N1 bridge and fished underneath it. I hooked a large (for this river) smallmouth bass on a tungsten beaded black woolly bugger in size 10 which pulled my arm off (well nearly). It is amazing how much bigger these river smallmouth bass look underwater and then how they seem to shrink in size when you land them... I also landed a few smaller bass in a long run a bit lower down before we called it quits at 5pm. I ended the day with 24 largemouth bass, 9 smallmouth bass and 6 Nile tilapia. All in all a brilliant day.
The frizz fry and methods used in this short article will appear shortly in an E book that I am working on. Watch this space....
A lovely smallmouth bass caught on a frizz fry
Nile tilapia
46 cm largemouth bass caught on a frizz fry
45cm Nile Tilapia caught on a frizz fry
Lipping a smallmouth bass (Photo Bradley Baatjes)
A lovely Berg River smallmouth bass caught on a black wooly bugger (Photo Bradley Baatjes)
The frizz fry, bass slayer of note
Sean's minnow
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