
Date of Report: Friday, 20th June 2025 |
Name: Andrew Fowler Email: truttablog@gmail.com Web: http://truttablog.com Phone: 082 574 4262 Stillwater season is in full swing, and the calendar is punctuated by the usual stillwater winter competitions. For fear of misrepresenting the stats from those competitions, I will defer to the organisers and their social media posts as to how they went or are going. But on the anecdotal front, which I suppose is my forte, things are a lot tougher than most want to admit. I fished two stillwaters in the last week on a farm where the owner admitted that the fishing has been very poor for the last 2 months. I furthered that problem by having just one take and seeing 2 rises in a full day on the water. Two other fishing jaunts which I got to learn of...a few blokes enjoying a quiet day on a private water in both cases, amounted to a fish per angler per day, and those were full days at that. Just a scattering of stockies and 1 or 2 fish from 19 to 21 inches. Another bloke phoned this morning to say that he fished in one of the competitions, and he and his team were way up the leader board despite catching very few fish, so him and I were drawing some rough conclusions from that. One syndicate has been commenting that the last two seasons of very good rainfall, have been less than desirable from a Trout fishing perspective. On another front, a researcher shared some data with me recently: the prevalence of heatwaves in the berg since the early fifties. Interestingly the last 20 years has seen a striking increase in those. Also, the average annual air temp in the berg has risen by 1.1 degrees C during this time. Rainfall, however, is steady on average. I haven't dug into the severity of storms or variability in individual rainfall events, but certainly in terms of annual average, there is no rainfall trend up or down since the fifties. So, climate change might be a juicy topic to discuss at the pub after a tough day's fishing. Hell, we need all the excuses we can get, right? It has to be said that the catastrophic gale that followed last week's snow event, hasn't helped. Dams were whipped to a froth by winds which destroyed farm sheds, rolled bales across valleys and snapped plantations like twigs. The result is that many waters have been off-colour. There were also 193 000 power outages reported in KZN. Perhaps they will have settled and cleared by the time you read this though. And with a bit of luck some of the poor farmers will get their power back too. The weather at present is that good old winter stuff we know: frosty mornings, but mild sunny days which are warm in the sun and cold in the shade or a breeze. I measured a water temp of 9.5 degrees C in the shallows the other day, and that normally drops to about 7 degrees in the death of winter. As a true fisherman, I am tying up some juicy flies and watching the diary for the next opportunity to get out and buck the trend. Feel free to help me with that. Tight lines Andrew Fowler 082 57 44 262 Winter on a Midlands stillwater. |