YELLOW SUBMARINES

In South Africa, we call traffic lights robots. We have car guards at major shopping centers to guide you in and out of your parking spot and watch your car while you shop—call it job creation, like not being able to pump your own gas in Oregon or New Jersey. We have 11 official languages. No, lions do not roam freely on the streets. Yes, we do actually have trout, but better, we have smallmouth yellowfish.

Driven by tradition, convention and compulsion, trout were seen as the epitome of flyfishing in South Africa for a very long time. Grueling efforts and journeys of epic proportion were put into motion in the late 1800s to stock even the most remote South African headwaters with trout secured from Europe and North America. Trout received unchallenged front-page status for decades until the 1980s, when a few pioneers of the sport, motivated by the urge to get a tug closer to home, decided to cast a line into our largest river, the Orange/Vaal River system, which winds through the better part of South Africa from east to west. What followed was reel-busting, rod-flexing, ankle-snapping, sprinting mayhem as it was discovered that smallmouth yellowfish eat flies readily. This epiphany resulted in the dire need to decipher the specie and design techniques—and flies to consistently and successfully target them...

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