ANY ANGER I FELT, I FELT AT MYSELF.

Ewan Naude

I was staking out a pool that I knew had a very big resident Clanwilliam yellow that I estimated at between 14 and 15lb. These pools are properly overgrown with a lot of vegetation and big undercut banks. Typically, the only chance you would have of getting a fly in front of a fish like this would be when it changes position from one of the undercut banks and swims across the pool to the other side and another undercut bank. So, I positioned myself where there was less vegetation, but it was still very tricky to fish. I then waited. Within half an hour, and out the corner of my eye, I saw something move from the opposite bank. This fish swam right near the surface towards me and, miraculously, I managed to get a Papa Roach fly a metre-and-a-half to the right of it. It ended up being a good cast and the fish just turned, inhaled the fly and, as I set the hook, it took off. I had two or three loops of fly line out and one of the loops hooked on my chest pack and popped the 2x. Just. Like. That.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from me because you obviously don’t get shots at fish like that often. I didn’t rage. As it happened, I probably let out an expletive or two but I felt very bummed. Any anger I felt, I felt at myself. “What could I have done better?” “Why was I wearing a chest pack?” I never wear a chest pack.

I did not sleep well that night at all. My campmate Andreas’s snoring kept me up, which wasn’t great, but so did the loss of that fish.

I still think about it often. It’s kak. I think about what it would have felt like to see the fish in my hands, what the photo would have looked like, how exciting it would have been to have sight-caught a fish of that calibre. A big sight-caught Clannie is not a very common thing.