“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It.

Rivers, lakes and streams cascaded through my youth and churned into my adulthood with the force of the Congo. And April has often been the backdrop for those watery encounters, rod in hand in pursuit of fish and in search of the “words”, as Maclean so eloquently put it, that lie beneath the rocks, ghostly echoes from the “basement of time”.

April in most latitudes represents a change of season. In my native Nova Scotia, a jagged piece of forest-coated granite jutting out into the North Atlantic, it is the first stirring of spring. The general perception is that April in Nova Scotia is now colder than it was a few decades ago, and I do recall wonderful Aprils with sunny days and temperatures sometimes in the upper teens or even 20 – spring is a relative concept. And of course, it meant the start of the trout season. That was what marked it on the calendar – Easter was celebrated because it was a four-day weekend in trout season! Rabbit season would end in February, leaving March a hunting and fishing wasteland of snow and freezing rain.

But April signalled an angler’s emergence from hibernation. Rods would be dusted off, the new line would be applied to reels, hooks and swivels hastily bought.

Image by Ed Stoddard (Dullstroom)

As a teenager and a young adult, I only dabbled in fly fishing, which is now my consuming passion. In my youth, I caught trout mainly with bait on spinning rods, and in April it often meant purchasing minnows from the aptly named “Boys’ Minnows”, a family business in a rural village on the province’s eastern shore not far from my hometown of Dartmouth. Those minnows, impaled on hooks and thrown into the cold waters of secret pools on the Musquodoboit River, would often deliver the goods – speckled trout, dappled with yellow and red spots, would seize the offering and suddenly, your rod is bent and the fight is on! This was the stuff of adolescent dreams – especially an adolescent who only dreamt of fishing and hunting. Cold, cramped mornings spent in boats in April, occasionally with snowflakes falling, other times on sunny days with steam catching the solar glare as it rose from the water. A campfire might be made to boil up some tea: the aroma of wood smoke on such days is etched in my senses. Bringing home a mess of wild Nova Scotia trout – the pink flesh melts in your mouth – was one of April’s grand rituals.

In Vilnius, Lithuania, where I lived for a number of years in the 1990s, I finally exchanged my bait rods for fly rods and have never looked back. Like a fly emerging in the depths from its larval stage, it was a metamorphosis.

For several of those years, I lived in a quaint flat on the edge of the historic Old Town, which overlooked a stream, the Vilnia. It had apparently returned to life because of the collapse of polluting Soviet industries, and it was brimming with grayling and brown trout. October was my favourite month to fish there, but April was also special as it heralded the start of the season, with lengthening, warmer days and fresh insect hatches on the water. My backdrop consisted of dazzling old churches, Catholic and Orthodox, including an ornate example of riotous brick gothic. The odd goat grazed on the banks as chickens scratched around – the rural/urban divide was less pronounced in Eastern Europe than it was to the west. The stream itself was narrow, rocky and fast-flowing, where I honed my nascent fly-fishing skills catching mostly smallish grayling and the occasional trout.

The grayling had a fan-like dorsal fin and would often launch themselves acrobatically into the air once hooked, while trout would plunge for the depths and the rocks. It was all great fun and would often end at a neighbourhood pub where I would stop for a pint or two, fly-rod in hand and clad in dripping olive-coloured wading boots.

And now, for over 17 of the past 22 years, I have called South Africa home, and remain under the enchanting spells cast by April. Here, of course, it is the start of the austral autumn, a cooling transition period where I switch my attention from native yellow fish, lovers of warm water, to non-native trout, which prefer their H20 on the cold side. There is good river trout fishing to be had in the summer months as well – in dams, it is hit and miss when it is hot – but autumn is my favourite angling season.

My fishing diary tells me that this is when I really start catching trout, usually at the lovely Brookwood venue in the Cradle, with follow-up trips to Dullstroom and the KZN Midlands, among others. Some deciduous species of tree here will turn from green to red and gold in April before shedding their leaves, which float on streams or the surface of dams. Beneath lay the trout, mostly rainbows. Reactivated by the falling temperatures, they will readily smash into a wooly bugger or another reliable trout pattern in one of my many fly boxes – mostly so-called “wet flies” because they are used on a sinking line. Fittingly, I have found autumn colours such as orange, yellow and red to be effective from April – it falls before the spawning season for rainbows in South Africa, and that seems to have something to do with it, as the hen’s eggs have a reddish-orange hue and trout, like revolutions, will devour their own. An aquatic ecosystem is far rougher than what obtains on land. And if I am lucky, the trout will rise to the surface, their tell-tale circular wake rippling along the leaves, and may take a dry-fly pattern, which rests on the surface with a floating line.

Unlike trout, barbel are tough as nails, and can withstand a long fight without getting winded.

April is also usually the final month before autumn really descends in which I can do battle with barbel, which go to ground in winter. Much to my astonishment and delight, I have over the course of the past 2-1/2 years landed and released 26 of these powerful catfish a scant 1.5 kms – a mile – from our home in the Joburg suburb of Parkmore. For like my beloved Vilnia, the Braamfontein Spruit has also seemingly returned to life. When we first moved back to South Africa from Dallas nine years ago, I began running along a trail, popular with mountain bikers, which snakes along the Spruit following an Eskom power line. For several years I saw no sign of life in its waters –  for example, no birds, such as herons, egrets, or cormorants, that would indicate the presence of frogs or fish.

That changed in late 2017, with my first sighting of a Spruit fish – perhaps I had missed something all along, but egrets, herons and even cormorants now are regular visitors to the Spruit, and in numbers that I did not see just a few years ago. I have seen a cormorant with a very small fish in its beak. And the barbel is thriving. I have witnessed schools of them in their early summer spawning ritual, when they swarm and frolic in shallow pools.

The reasons behind this apparent renewal are unclear – I sent an email query about it a while back to the Gauteng government but received no response (There are lots of government spokespeople in this country who did not get the memo explaining that responding to journalists is a key part of their job description). I would still not drink water from or bathe in the Spruit, or eat any fish that I pulled out of there – they are always released to swim and scrap another day. But the system does seem to be less polluted than it was in the past.

My target area for barbel is one large pool where they tend to congregate. The ecological and social setting highlights South Africa’s glaring disparities. I fish from a bank in the “Field and Study” park, a popular place for dog walking in the seemingly ancient pre-lockdown era. Nearby is a horse stable catering to wealthy equestrians. A few hundred metres in the other direction downstream is the very upmarket River Club golf course. And across from where I fish is an emerging squatter camp. Many of the residents there eke out a living – from which they are now deprived because of the lockdown – gathering recycled material in the surrounding suburbs. If this is a case of “trickle down” economics, these poor souls are getting the crumbs.

In short, it is a slice of South Africa, with its jarring juxtapositions, on steroids.

Meanwhile, in the water, the barbel are steroid-charged. I use a heavy fly rod and line for them – in technical terms, 8 or 9 weights (By contrast, a 4 to 6 weight is my usual range for trout). People tend to think of catfish as lazy bottom feeders. Nothing could be further from the truth. The barbel is an alpha-aquatic predator. A barbel will hit the surface like a torpedo, and in the ensuing battle pull like a bakkie as it instinctively drives toward the far bank and holes and logs where it can free itself. I generally use two flies about 30 cms apart: a smaller one on the bottom, the larger one on top acting as an “attractor”. There are only a handful of barbel patterns I use, including a huge fly I dub the “purple haze”, which imitates a frog with purple legs ploughing through the water. Another very successful fly is the “half chicken,” which looks nothing like a Nando’s meal. My record in one outing was four. I have also twice had farcical incidents when I impaled myself with barbel flies – the revenge of the fish I suppose. Fortunately, I have a brother-in-law who is a GP who on both occasions extracted the flies from my fingers. I once strode into his waiting room with a huge fly protruding from my finger like some ghastly ring and his receptionist rolled her eyes as if to say “here comes that hillbilly Canadian brother-in-law of the boss”.

Unlike trout, barbel are tough as nails, and can withstand a long fight without getting winded. I suppose the biggest one I have landed probably came in at close to 3 kg. For a fishing fanatic who works from home at his own pace, it is an immense privilege to have great game fishing almost literally in my backyard. The best time is late in the morning, when few people are about, or after a big rain, when the barbel are on the rise. November to January are the best months, with April the last opportunity to catch them before September’s relative warmth entices them to bite again, or return to their summer habitat.

“The Barbel … is so strong, that he will often break both rod and line, if he proves to be a big one,” wrote Izaak Walton in his 1653 angling classic, The Compleat Angler, or, the Contemplative Man’s Recreation.

 Angling, especially with a fly rod, is indeed a “contemplative” recreation, and is no longer restricted to men –  my mother was an accomplished angler in her day, and is not the only female member of my fishing family who plies the water. President Cyril Ramaphosa is certainly a “contemplative man”, and he is also a keen fly fisherman. And in lockdown, I am contemplative at the moment about fishing. In this period of shared but also wildly unequal sacrifice and hardship, it may seem very middle-class to moan about being cut off from recreational activities such as fishing. But surely everyone is dreaming of the return to relative normality. And an angler needs fishing like a trout needs oxygenated water. To cast and to contemplate over a pool or a dam is a dream that keeps me going.

So I shall practice some technical casting in my garden, such as the “bow and arrow” technique that I have yet to master, and perhaps sort out and rearrange my huge collection of flies yet again. May lies before me, and it is a prime month for trout, both in South Africa and my native waters that flow across that rugged piece of real estate on the wind-swept North Atlantic.

But April, oh April, I do miss your association with fishing. A river has always run through April. I have friends and family back home in Nova Scotia straining at the line to hit the water, and good fishing mates here who are also spoiling for the fight, as am I. Barely a mile away, the barbel I hope are swimming and feeding in peace – so tantalisingly close, and yet so very far from our current reality. When we are released from lockdown, I will rise like a hungry trout to the call of the fly. For like Norman Maclean, I am haunted by waters. DM/ ML