Wes Fishing Flies

Location :

• Martin Cheruiyot

  29 March 2016

  Trout were first introduced into Kenya’s highland streams in 1905. Men like Ewart Grogan, ‘baddest and boldest of a bad bold gang’, shipped Loch Leven fingerlings in ice-packed chests to Mombasa and then up to the Rift Valley on the Lunatic Express. From there, porters carried them up into the misty, forested Aberdare and Mount Kenya slopes. Trout were first introduced into Kenya’s highland streams in 1905. Men like Ewart Grogan, ‘baddest and boldest of a bad bold gang’, shipped Loch Leven fingerlings in ice-packed chests to Mombasa and then up to the Rift Valley on the Lunatic Express. From there, porters carried them up into the misty, forested Aberdare and Mount Kenya slopes. Rivers with now legendary names such as Amboni, Gichugi and the two Mathioyas were stocked — and our fly fishers’ paradise was born.
  
  Last week in Nairobi, the Kenya Fly Fishers’ — the oldest club of its kind in all of Africa — held its 95th annual dinner. It was a strictly male affair, more than 100 members and their guests. Visually it was pure H.M. Bateman. In terms of atmosphere it would make the Bullingdon seem rather left-wing.
  
  ‘Only one lady has ever dared to break the taboo,’ KFFC chairman Chris Harrison had explained to me. ‘The late Jane Froome, mother of the Tour de France cyclist Chris, attended a dinner in the 1980s dressed in black tie. Nobody made a fuss, but she decided by pudding that it was not for her, and left…’
  
  My friend Chris Foot was one of the speakers and he rose by saying, ‘The last time I saw this many Wazungu in one room was in 1963 — when you lost!’ Some 52 years after Uhuru, Foot is from among the more indigenous members, but also a Molo wheat farmer and head of our national movie commission. He’s an accomplished piscator and his speech was all double entendres about rivers that were like past loves: the Laerdal in Norway, the Vatnsdala in Iceland, the Kennet in Britain, the Kericho in our western tea estates and the river that took his virginity — the Kiptiget in Kenya’s Mau forest.
  
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  After a very ebullient dinner I had to give a speech too. I’m not a member of the KFFC, even though I’m a fanatical fly fisherman. Clubs tend not to let me in. I spoke about how I’ve spent almost every episode of my life trying to fly fish, even in sundry war zones like the Balkans. How, since childhood, fishing has given me my happiest of memories — and how, even as we become more decrepit with age, we become better fishermen.
  
  From what I can recall it went down OK. I didn’t get scragged. Just before dawn we were racking up billiards but not one of us could hit a ball, not even at a corner pocket when the chairman was lying on the table with his legs in the air.
  
  And the fishing is still very good.

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