NOTE: Cloud 9 has unfortunately been closed to the public and the farm sold…
Another week-long fishing trip, another visit to our happy place, Beacon Vlei. But again we also visited a few other venues:
Cloud 9 – Craigie Burn Dam
Midmar Nature Reserve – Midmar Dam
Station House – Mearns Dam
Let’s start with the first phase of our trip…
After hearing fantastic stories about the fishing at Craigie Burn dam we decided to make it our pre-Beacon Vlei stop. We found Cloud 9 and it looked like the perfect accommodation option for us.
A friendly and helpful Veronica met us on arrival and we quickly made our way down to our unit and the dam. We unpacked and immediately started rigging up the supplied boat with our motor and battery and away we went.
Straight away we started catching lots of small bass, at times you got a bite with almost every cast. It was a lot of fun but we were hoping to at least catch one decent fish which never happened unfortunately. The little ones were just too quick and although we think we saw one or two big ones they clearly weren’t hungry.
We may have caught some smallmouth bass amongst the masses but we never checked because we didn’t know Craigie Burn dam had smallmouth bass. Next time…
In terms of the accommodation the 4 chalets are actually attached to form one larger building. All of them have a view of the dam which is about 150m away with all necessities inside including a TV which we never even switched on. We found it comfortable and will stay there again when we visit Craigie Burn in the near future.
Summary
We really enjoyed Craigie Burn Dam and Cloud 9. We caught lots of small bass but we now know there are some big fish in the dam, we just need to find them. And since we probably only explored 10% of the dam we’ll definitely need to return soon.
(1 day)
bass x40 (small)
