Three Falls and My Fly Fishing Escape
The South African school year ends with the calendar year, which meant that when I arrived back in 1979, I stepped straight into the final term of Standard 5 at St. John's Prep. Somehow—probably through sheer momentum—I scraped through and was promoted into the College proper. Classes would start again in February 1980.
It was, to put it mildly, a cultural whiplash. St. John’s was all granite buildings and graver faces. A Victorian boot camp of a school that looked like it had been conjured out of a bad dream and an older boy’s Latin homework. There were stern masters, silent reading under trees, chapel, and, yes, the potential to be caned if you stepped too far out of line. The entire place had a chill to it that wasn’t about the Johannesburg winter.
It stood in stark contrast to the school life I’d known and loved in Mallorca. My friends were far away, and the freedom of my two-wheeled adventures was gone. In its place: silent hallways, a stiff uniform, and the deadening bureaucracy of institutional education. I did what I could to hang onto some thread of familiarity—though I couldn’t really recreate my old room in Mallorca until our shipment arrived. When it finally did, I set everything up exactly as it had been, down to the layout of my desk. When my Labrador, Honey, and little Candy finally emerged from their three-month quarantine, it helped. A bit.
But what really saved me—what truly became my lifeline in that cold grey place—was fly fishing.
I’d had my first taste of it on our final trip to South Africa before the move, and it had hooked me completely. That same weekend, Niels joined his friend Charles Fiddian-Green’s fly fishing syndicate, which gave us access to a remarkable piece of land in the Eastern Transvaal: Three Falls Estate.
That Christmas—1979—we packed up for our first proper holiday there and stayed in a rickety old Boer War cottage called Willow Cottage. No electricity. Everything was powered by gas. There were these lamps mounted on the walls with silk mantles you had to light just right—delicate little domes that flared once and then left behind a white skeleton of ash, which glowed gently every time you lit it. The whole place had an atmosphere I still struggle to describe. It felt like another world, or a forgotten corner of this one.
Three Falls was fed by a strong, perennial river that had been shaped into a series of named weirs—Willow Pond, Chaudry, Christmas Weir and many more—they were stocked by a farm manager who also ran the trout hatchery on-site. I didn’t know or care that the fish were stocked. It felt like pure wilderness to me.
I’d wake up at first light, fish until I was starving, return for breakfast, then go back out again. It was rhythm, meditation, escape—and it was mine.
I threw myself into fly tying. Niels had given me his old Veniard’s kit, but that Christmas, he and my mom got me something even better: a proper fly box from the Orvis catalog, filled with iconic patterns. One side for dry flies. The other for wets Zug Bug, Montana Bug, Prince and many more. I still have that box. I made it my mission to replicate every fly inside it, one by one, sometimes many times over.
They also gave me a two-volume tome called Trout by Ernst Schwiebert, which I read from cover to cover like scripture. I taught myself how to double haul—using our garden as my practice range—until I could lay out a full 35-yard fly line.
One day, down at Three Falls, Niels marched me up to Chaudry, where Charles was hosting guests, and said, “Wait ‘til you see what my brother can do.” I cast the full length of my line, clean and fast. They stood there blinking, not quite sure what they'd just seen. I think that was the first time I really surprised an adult.
It wasn’t just a hobby—it was medicine. School life at St. John’s was so grim that I lived for our fishing weekends. When one came up, I’d bunk Saturday school with my mom’s full blessing. Fly fishing was the only place where I wasn’t being measured, judged, corrected, or boxed in. It was mine. And for the next few years, it would remain one of the very few things that kept me sane.
No, I didn’t adjust easily to being back in South Africa. But I learned how to tie a killer Pheasant Tail Nymph, cast a perfect loop into the wind, and hold on to something that made me feel grounded—even when everything else felt like it was drifting.