South Africa’s Yellowfish
South African fly fishers have both rainbow and brown trout that can be sought with imitations of feathers, fur, and steel, but like anglers everywhere, many fly rodders seek other species as well. The yellowfish is a group of giant minnows of the family Cyprinidae that fits the fly fisher’s bill very well. They feed much like trout and are every bit as selective and wary. Many articles in The Complete Fly Fisher Magazine (South Africa’s nicely done fly fishing magazine) are focused on this indigenous group of fish.
Gerrit Redpath recently sent me a story of fishing the Orange River for the Smallmouth Yellowfish (Labeobarbus aeneus). The Orange is the longest river in South Africa. It headwaters in the Drakensberg mountains in Lesotho and flows west through South Africa to the Atlantic Ocean. Its waters are not the crystalline flows that the trout fisher envisions, but the fish are there and eager for the fly. As Gerrit notes, “They are a warm water species, sharing some behavioral attributes with trout in terms of lies within a river. As opposed to trout they, however, tend to move around more between the ample lies within the river from where they feed predominantly on caddis and mayfly immature stages.”
Sounds like a nymph fisher’s delight. Actually it is, as Gerrit points out, “Prospecting glides and the heads of riffle sections soon put curves into pulsating graphite and smiling faces alike. Various nymphing methods were experimented with, but the bottom line remained heavily weighted control nymphs (sizes 10 to 8) with smaller (sizes 12 to 16) nymphs on droppers. One pleasant surprise was a number of large fish (4 to 6 pounds) taken in a very fast rapid section.”
The Orange is South Africa’s longest river and hosts good populations of Smallmouth Yellowfish.
The Smallmouth Yellowfish is a giant minnow.