Since Nick was working on Sunday we decided to have a fish on Saturday morning. Rather than head to the berg we tried something new and headed down to Inanda dam to bash some bass. Nick picked me up at 7am which was a nice change from the normal 5am, however in retrospect this may have been a little late as the temperature in the valley climbed to a sweltering 38 degrees.
We pumped up the tubes and were in the water by 8am. Nick quickly got into his first fish of the day, a small largemouth Bass taken on a flipper. I had started with an intermediate line and after Nick missed a few more takes I opted to switch to a small popper. Almost instantly I had a few takes on the surface but missed them all. It seemed like the fish were all relatively small and that the flies were perhaps a little large. I tried clipping off the weed guards hoping to not miss more takes but it didn’t seem to help.
Eventually I switched back to smaller wet flies (a Strip Leach) and managed to pick up 4 small bass from along the weed beds and reeds. Nick picked up one more fish on the popper, but as mentioned earlier, he missed a lot of takes. The surface seemed to be the way to go but smaller flies are required.
When our tubes looked about ready to explode we headed back to the car, let down the tubes and wallowed in the warm water.
At about 11am we headed out of the valley stopping off at Jillis Sports Bar (a shabeen in the valley overlooking Inanda) for a couple of quarts. There’s nothing quite like sitting on a rusting, scrap metal deck, downing a quart which cost R8 and enjoying the views of Inanda.