Transient Towpath Trudging - Pt.118 (Canal Zander)

Although electric cars have some negatives, depreciation being one of them, there is no denying they are good to drive. My near 5 year old Suzuki Jimny was in at the garage this week for a safety recall to replace the fuel pump and the courtesy car was a Peugeot e208. With 140odd hp and with 200lb'ft of torque plenty nippy enough and makes you realise just how archaic the Jimny is, but then the Jimny feels archaic against any modern vehicle really. 

>200 mile range, a modern interior, the Peugeot design team have certainly come on of late and are some of the most modern looking cars around at the moment. Obviously I driven lots of EV's over the years because of my job but there is no denying as the years go by as an overall package they are improving at a fast rate. Would I buy one, most certainly, even a 2nd hand one, but for now, the Jimny is here to stay. As someone who is a design interior for car interiors, I particularly liked the drop down door that you could rest your phone on to reveal the wireless charger, simple but novel I thought. 

Anyway it doesn't seem over 40 years I lived in South Africa, but it is 👀, our family moved to Pinelands in Cape Town because my late Dad got work as a precision tool maker, where he ended up setting up on his own. I still remember the food though. Bunny chow, often referred to simply as a bunny, is an Indian South African fast food dish consisting of a hollowed-out loaf of white bread filled with curry, which was rather nice and filling I must admit. Springbok biltong and probably my favourite Boerewors.  

Now the the word boerewors translates from Afrikaans as “farmer’s sausage,” an appropriate, if incomplete, description. It certainly is a sausage, being derived from the Dutch verste worst. The Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch colonizers, were also certainly farmers who. And depending on who’s you eat, or who you speak to, boerewors’ flavor profile, like its history, can be as simple or complex as you make it.

Boerewors is a coarse-grind, generally thick, predominantly beef sausage that by law must contain at least 90 percent total meat and no more than 30 percent fat. It is flavored heavily with coriander, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and salt, and then traditionally stuffed into pig or sheep intestines and coiled into six-foot-long continuous rolls. It is a legally protected term, and anything else that does not conform to the meat-content requirement may not be called boerewors; it must be labeled accordingly just as ‘wors’ along with a description of its main meat component, which is often from wild game like kudu.

Now you might find these in your local Lidl, and very nice they are too. Not as overly flavoured as I remember but then maybe my palate has changed since my time in South Africa where we must have had a braai every weekend. Such an outdoor lifestyle and as a kid, it couldn't be safer during the apartheid years, I wonder if it was pleasant day, we could get away with what we used to do as kids. On the weekend me and my twin brother were literally out from dawn till dusk getting up to mischief, and we were only 8 years old remember. 

What the heck is happening with the weather, I've been having BBQ's sheltering under the fishing umbrella just because if I didn't we wouldn't have had one, if I didn't. I decided to go back to the area where I lost a big Zander recently and this time it was out with the big guns, smelt you see I found by trial and error is a bait that Zander take readily. I'm sure the pungency helps in these mostly turbid waters but also the texture. 

The problem is with a roach deadbait you can often use the same bait a few times, the smelt if often one bite that's it, the bait is mangled beyond recognition. I was literally dressed up like it was winter, 12 degrees with a cold wind, the summer clobber just wouldn't cut it, especially when there was rain on and off too. The water temperature was just over 15 degrees so the recent poor weather had definitely put a kybosh on that of late.  

I had a fish on the bank after about 10 minutes on the RH rod which had the smelt on and I thought that was the start of something, but then it couldn't have been more different. Despite leapfrogging the hotspot twice over its whole length those Zander were just not showing at all. Last time I was here the bites were every ten minutes or so, this couldn't be more different.

I gave it a good 2.5 hours or so but the writing was already on the wall and I'm more impatient than  Eddy so I called it a day and returned to annoy the wife who was expecting a peaceful evening . 

A woman goes into a restaurant with 15 kids.

The kids start goofing around while she's talking to the waitress. The mom gets impatient and yells, "Eddy! Stop that! Or else!" All 15 boys suddenly sit down, obedient and quiet.

The waitress asks, "Did you really name all 15 of your boys Eddy?"

"Yup," says the woman. "Makes it easier than trying to remember who's who every damn time."

"But what if you only want to talk to one of them for some reason?" the waitress asks.

"Well, then I just call them by their last names."