Rested Rusties
I was driving from Standerton to Pretoria to pick up my brother Herman for our yearly family hunting trip when I got a call from my wife confirming an important doctors appointment, so we cancelled everything.
Seen as though we were at Herman’s house and had nothing to do, we got the boat ready to go fishing the next morning. We left at 5am and arrived at the lodge in the river at 6am to a very cold Rust de Winter dam.
We started fishing in the river section where the water temperature was 10 degrees celcius, but we could not buy a bite for the first 2 hours. We then started picking up fish in the deeper water as we moved towards the main dam and the water temperature had now climbed to a mere 11 degrees. These were officially the coldest fish I have ever caught.
We made our way into the main dam where the water started warming up. The water visibility cleared up to that of a meter deep. We fished all the grass edges and picked up a number of fish just under a kilo.
We worked our way back towards the river and found the fish sitting in the deep river channel. We picked up some nice fish over a kilo and pushed our bag up to 6kg’s. The wind started picking up heavily and made the conditions almost unbearable, however we were constantly picking up better fish. So we set the trolling motor to MAX and fought the elements.
Since we decided to leave the dam alone for a few years and stop all tournaments I have noticed the average fish sizes have increased. So the dam is recovering nicely, however the crocodiles and hippo’s in the main dam have really taken over and there has been an enormous wildlife boom.
FISHING TALES