Tom Sutcliffe

Medical Doctor, author and fly fisher.

tom sutcliffe
Tom Sutcliffe Photo By Gerhard Laubscher

Tom has fly fished nearly all his life, mainly in South Africa and Lesotho for trout, and in the Okovango Delta for tigerfish and bream. But he also has extensive experience of fly fishing in the South Island of New Zealand, Tasmania and British Columbia, where he has made a number of trips to the Kispiox and Bulkley rivers hunting for steelhead. He has fished in the United States in Montana and Vermont, in England on the Test, the Bourne and the Itchen, and in Switzerland and Germany.

Tom is a medical doctor living in Cape Town with his wife Kathy. They have five children. He is surrounded by clear, fast-flowing mountain streams thick with free-rising browns and rainbows. The large Clanwilliam yellowfish, an indigenous species and great sport on a fly, is available an hour to the north of Cape Town in gin-clear rivers, and there are smallmouth bass in the area that reach world-record size.

Tom has written three books on fly fishing for trout and one on fly tying. Quotes from his writings were recently published by Nick Lyons' in The Quotable Fisherman (The Lyons Press 1998, New York). He has written for the Orvis News, the London Field and is a regular contributor to South Africa's two major fly-fishing magazines, The Complete Fly Fisherman and Flyfishing. He is Vice-President of the Federation of Southern African Flyfishers, South Africa's equivalent of Trout Unlimited.

See articles by Tom Sutcliffe:

An Uncertain Science

Home » Tom Sutcliffe » An Uncertain Science An Uncertain Science There's this perpetual fantasy most fly fishers have of one day unearthing an untouched piece of water nobody's ever heard about, crystal clear of course, and fairly bristling with a hardy strain of largely forgiving trout - browns, if there's a choice. The Uncertain...

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