Day 4
A good bit of rain fell on the fourth night and with the amount of people on the boat I decided to leave my flyrods at the campsite. We were heading South again to see if we could do the “Phillipa Loop”. The river splits a couple of km’s North of Sepopa and comes together a couple of km’s South. About a 2.5hr boat drive.
We found an entrance to a lagoon and saw massive amount of activity. The water was still draining out of the swamp into that lagoon and there were fish everywhere! I couldn’t believe it. A barbel run. Small tigers were smashing everything, barbel were smashing spinners! The chaos was audible with the barbel herding the baitfish out of the reeds…… Oh no, my flyrods were at the campsite… Golden opportunity missed.
After the chaos was over (the barbel slowly started to get less and less and the bites dried up) we had lunch on the boat and headed to a flat straight to try the bait idea. I was not taking the bait for bait fishing and kept on casting spinners and spoons. First drift on the bait and Braam was on with a decent tiger that he landed (on bait) and Manie’s girlfriend (Chane) almost simultaneously caught a decent barbel (Fig.5) (on bait). The urge was just too much to catch a decent Tiger and I converted…. Ready for the second drift and my hook got stuck on a log at the beginning of the drift. The sun was starting to set and we had about a 30 minute boat drive back. Tail between my legs I admitted that the bait fishing concept wasn’t the worst idea.