Erhardt is absolutely obsessed with fishing. He lives, breathes it; especially fly fishing in particular. He has loved fishing from childhood. He used to beg his father to buy him fishing gear, he would buy the magazines, get books on fishing; any resource that he could and he taught himself how to fish. And I can’t quite understand it or explain that kind of passion.
Back in the days the South Pier was a treacherous pier. One occasion I was with a friend of mine, Krish, and on that particular day this rogue wave was heading our way.
In September 2019 my family and I went on holiday with some friends to a small costal town called Umzumbe approximately 100 kilometres south of Durban. When we arrived we all clambered down the dune path to get our feet into the cool sand. There the sea was calm and the sun was gentle. In the distance I noticed two fishers fishing on the rocks.
An ocean full of fish is any fisher’s dream. At the peak of Apartheid, a black man could barely stand on the ocean shore line let alone fish. A fisher was not attacked for fishing without a permit, but for the colour of their skin and for being in a whites-only designated area.
The guy comes running to me, ‘hey Snow, my connection fell in, now between the pier.’ This guy is jammed in between the blocks and the pier, and there’s no way you can get to him, because when I came there with my head torch, I looked at how I’m going to get down there. I know there’s no way you can jump in there and get him…
One morning we went out fishing and on one of my first casts, I caught a big brown trout. As we just started pulling it in, Erhardt caught a brown trout as well. That’s like two in a row, it’s unheard of, and nice decent sized trout right after one another.
