A man was shot and killed this weekend at De Rust, Hartebeespoort dam. Six men approached mr. Jaco de Jager and his friend Hennie Jones. De Jager was shot in his camping chair and died in the arms of his wife. You can read the original article as it was written in Beeld here

Please make sure that you always visit De Rust and nearby venues as a group. We do not recommend camping at this moment in time. The owner claims that security takes priority and that they are working hard to improve the safety of their campers. Unfortunately, as an angling community we can only rely on ourselves when it comes to safety at our fishing venues. This is an unforgiving and selfish act by people with no regard for human life.

Our prayers are with the family of the victim.

Some of the photos below were provided by Koedoe angling club.

We arrived early Saturday morning and was soon greeted by a few friendly faces, a warm fire and a cup of coffee. Because this was a workshop and we had a prior engagement later that afternoon we decided not to take our rods along, in hindsight, clearly a mistake. Two of the youngsters, Charldon and Roald Matthee caught two beautiful Hartebeespoort dam carps of 5.30 and 5.90 kilograms respectively early on and as the day progressed Markus Swart, Elrich Lambrechts, Sarel Boshoff, Barend Booyse and Peet Vorster joined in with their fish weighing in at 5.50, 3.90, 6.95, 6.00 and 3.30 kilograms.

Fishing depths varied, carp caught earlier the morning fed at 70 to 80 metres while the carp that came out as the day progressed was caught at a distance of 100 to 120 metres, all on sweet white dough.

In the past Hartebeespoort dam have been criticised for the amount of pollution in and around the dam. Altough there is still a fair amount of pollution affecting the area it must be said that conditions have greatly improved in the past two years and fishing standards are once again good. Unfortunately crime is still a problem and there are no real facilities for women to speak of at De Rust. If you decide to pay this venue a visit and to spend the night, make a point of going in a group and have at least two or more people awake at any point during the night.

For more information or to leave your comments, visit our De Rust page.

Photo provided by Beeld.You can read the original article as written by here.

The Hartebeespoort dam water quality

It is probably important to know that this dam was once a clean well preserved tourist destination. Now? Now it’s only a tourist destination, a green, money generating, polluted tourist destination. As rightfully said by my brother-in-law, only a scratch-and-sniff patch can truely provide our readers with the full effect, because it is not only the green colour but also the ‘wonderful’ smell completing the Hartebeespoort-dam-effect as we know it today.

Driving towards the famous tunnel, the traffic gave me a chance to get out of the car and walk around the bank.

Driving towards the famous tunnel

Notice the empty beer bottle in the photo below.

Pollution at Hartebeespoort dam

Despite all the bad reports on Hartebeespoort dam I still have a desperate longing to at least try fishing the various venues and we probably will. Recent reports in ‘The Tight Lines’ gave positive reviews on resorts such as De Rust and it might be worth while spending a few hours fishing these venues.

It is a real dissapointment that this issue is once again seeing the light of day, especially since resorts such as Ifafi and De Rust was starting to become the popular fishing destinations they once were!