Ourano Pointers

Home
South Africa
Senqu
Ourano Pointers

Call Directions Website Contact the business

Africa’s first Orvis endorsed wingshooting destination and outfitter. An exclusive 100+ year old Heritage home & National Monument. Home of Ourano Pointers.

Wingshooting & Flyfishing lodge in the EC Highlands of South Africa. [email protected]

08/11/2026

I don’t think I ever truly grasped how a man becomes his environment. I’d heard it said, nodded at it, observed it briefly and moved on. That was foolish of me, and shortsighted. It took the last year and a half up here to teach me what it means.

I’ve been carving this life out of hardwood. Not soft pine that gives under the blade, but the kind of wood that blunts your tools, splits your knuckles and makes you earn every curve. What nobody tells you is that while you’re shaping the wood, the wood is shaping you. Every cut takes something from your hands and gives them something back.

I know, with absolute certainty, that the man I was five years ago could not have done this. He would not have lasted out here. Life arrives exactly on time; God knows that better than we do. Perhaps it’s age. Perhaps it’s coming into a truer kind of manhood. I’m not sure. But I have changed, deeply, and I know there is more change still to come.

I expected the inner change. You don’t live this close to the mountains, the dogs and the solitude without your mind and spirit being rearranged, sometimes abruptly, sometimes quietly. What I didn’t expect was the body.

I’ve trained hard most of my life. Now, by the end of a cold mountain day, I’m often too beaten up to finish a proper workout. And yet my body has changed anyway, in ways no gym could replicate. Your legs climb without asking. Your lungs stop noticing the thin air. Your hands harden into something else, and the cold no longer bites the way it used to. The mountains did this. Not a training block. Not some scientifically designed programme. Hundreds of ordinary days and thousands of kilometres of walking, carrying, kneeling, bending and twisting. You become something else. In every way.

The Greeks had a word for it: μεταμόρφωσις, metamorphosis. A change of form. I always thought it began on the inside and worked its way out. Up here, I’m learning it comes from both directions at once. The mountains get into you through the soles of your boots, and through the wind that cuts across your cheeks like a scythe.

All this time you think you’re carving the wood.
All along, the wood has been carving you.

31/10/2026

Everything worth building starts as a mess.

And right now, everything here is being built. Including, perhaps most notably, myself. For what? I am unsure, but one day, looking back, it will be revealed to me. Maybe as an old man, maybe in a few years. The not knowing is the gift in itself. When last were you given a real surprise?

The puppies have started their training journeys. First scent of a bird on the wind. First unsure points that collapse into joy. First moments where something old and bred-in wakes up behind their eyes and you see, for a second, the dog they’re going to become. You can’t rush it. You can only shape the conditions and wait for character to show itself. Heraclitus said character is destiny. ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων. Every morning I watch him proven right.

The property is the same story, in stone. Old walls stripped back to find what’s sound. Rotten things pulled out. New things laid on foundations someone else set a century ago, by gifted hands I’ll never know, for a strange Greek man they never imagined. That’s humbling. You don’t own a place like this. You’re just its custodian for a while.

And underneath it all, the usual weather of the mind. Builders who don’t show. Money that leaves faster than it arrives. Work that runs late on promises that ran out early. The quiet chorus of people who prefer you smaller. And the loudest critic of all, the one who lives in your own head and knows exactly where to aim, and where to find you.

Here’s what I’m learning. The mess is not the opposite of progress. The mess IS the progress. Every ripped-out beam, every unsure puppy, every sleepless 3am ledger is part of the foundation. Nobody admires the foundations of a house. But nothing stands without them.

So I keep laying stones. Like a stonemason never taught the trade, on his first day of the job. In the walls, in the dogs, in myself. Some days it feels like nothing is finished, and you hope the stones you’ve laid are sound. Then a young pup freezes rock solid on a scent nobody taught it, and the mountains go quiet, and I remember why I’m here.

Not everything I’m building will be finished in my lifetime.

But that was never the point.

29/10/2026

Five years ago, I lost my footing.

I had an agreement with a pair of landowners for lodging and wingshooting on their property. It was a young operation, and everyone understood it needed time to find its legs. For a while, it was good. We got along well. We shared the same hopes for it.

Then the calls stopped being answered. Messages went unread. The silence said what nobody would.

A local operator had convinced them to cut me loose and hand him the hunting rights. I understood it, in a way. You side with your neighbour. All I ever asked for was a phone call. An honest word.

It cost me four bookings. Three of those clients never came back. That was my reputation to carry and rebuild, not theirs. Later I learned the badmouthing had followed me, quietly, to the very people I’d go on to buy my property from.

If anyone had reason to speak ill of anyone, it was me.

I didn’t. Not then, not once in the five years since. Until today, only my family has heard this story. I’ve told it now, and I’ve left the names out on purpose.

I took it on the chin and went my own way. I was raised to treat people with respect and kindness, whether or not it is returned. So that’s what I kept doing.

Five years on, I wake up on a National Monument I’m grateful to call home. It’s the headquarters of an Orvis endorsed operation, with more good ground than one man could ask for and clients who come back year after year.

I don’t say that to keep score. I say it because I once thought being pushed out was the end of something, and it turned out to be the beginning.

So here’s what I’ve learned. Do good. Be good. Be genuine. Be honest. Look a man in the eye when you have something hard to say. And never go around someone’s back, because the wheel of life turns for all of us, and the climb back up is a long one.

17/10/2026

The puppies are carving their personalities. Slowly but surely. You start noticing the differences — beyond the obvious physical and conformational ones — the little quirks, the characters emerging.

You watch from a distance and up close. Walking with them is a fundamental part of this process. There is enormous value to be gleaned. You store it — in the memory of the mind, but also in the eye’s memory — learning their different movements and patterns so you can start identifying who is who at 300 metres across our mountainous playground. It is one of the quieter joys of this life. Unhurried. Unwitnessed.

This chapter calls for a kind of lockdown. A good kind. Building projects, renovations, improvements — all of it demands my presence and attention all day. It is just a chapter though. A necessary one. And all chapters end.

I don’t think this novel is ending anytime soon. The chapters are numerous and unnumbered.

The mountains are patient. Nature is patient. I am slowly learning to be too as I sit amongst all of this more and more.

As much as my dogs are my life’s work, so is this property. I feel a deep reverence for it. It may be mine for now, but I’m merely a custodian. A guardian, until the next worthy one comes along.

I have my own guardians around me most days too. Even when they aren’t visible, you feel them. That quiet but unmistakable sense that you are not entirely alone in what you are trying to build here.

There are days — weeks even — that require a different version of you. And it is important that you show up as that version every single day until that season ends.

This is one of those seasons. I’m showing up. Gritting my teeth, smiling through the toil, the dog hair and dust on my clothes and skin.

Some seasons plant. Others harvest. This one is all about planting

13/10/2026

I’ve been asked more than once — by clients, friends, family — “What changed after becoming The Orvis Company endorsed?”

Personally, absolutely nothing.

Professional measures and practices were in place long before I could call myself a full-time professional at this. Regimens and programmes built over a decade ago that still hold their place in the system today. The endorsement didn’t create the standard. It recognised one that already existed.

Being aligned with a brand like The Orvis Company — Africa’s first endorsed destination — evokes genuine pride. But I believe we have so much more to offer and grow into. The endorsement is not the ceiling. It is a door.

This natural wonderland we call home and office is more than unique. It is awe-inspiring. And deeply humbling. Making all of this work — out here, in the middle of nowhere — leaves you a better human being. In the middle of the greatest stresses and challenges, you find a visceral rawness in getting to know who you truly are. On a soul level. You meet a part of yourself you had never greeted before. Never even seen. And this from someone who has spent a great deal of time getting to know himself without distraction or noise.

To be spoken of alongside The Orvis Company has nothing to do with ego, achievement, or anything monetary. It is about alignment. A family brand that has never sold out to the mass machine — that has held its integrity across generations. On a much smaller, humbler scale, that is exactly what we are about too.

That is what resonates. That is what it means.

07/09/2026

“The hardest truth is that your greatest work may be seen by no one, and yet you must do it anyway for the one who watches is you.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

19/08/2026

“A human does not take wing until they reach the edge of the abyss.”
~Nikos Kazantzakis

16/08/2026

Ourano’s C litter has arrived.

Ten puppies. Six females, four males. Born on the 10th of August 2025 in a snowstorm in the Eastern Cape Drakensberg highlands, Rhodes, South Africa.

Mother: Bianca of Ourano — a proven Drakensberg huntress and Ourano true to type through and through, first time dam, extraordinary in every respect as a mountain huntress.

Father: Saxo of Oscar (Cyprus) — pure European working Pointer genetics, the first of their kind in South Africa.

They arrived in snow and cold, under a heat lamp, and next to a fire, in a whelping box built by hand, in a place dubbed Ouranopolis — where earth meets heaven.

Ten puppies. Which will be named for Ancient Greek mythology, for constellations, for the southern sky above these mountains, and for a Greek song about a man approaching forty who never forgot to aim at aeroplanes.

Ourano. The Greek word for sky — but more than sky. The horizon where earth meets heaven. The place the dogs run toward. The place they disappear to when they cast far and wide across a Drakensberg ridge and become, for a moment, something between the ground and the infinite above it. The names of this litter come from that same place. Ancient Greek mythology, celestial bodies, the constellations visible from the southern hemisphere sky above Rhodes.
Each name earned. Each name connected.

The next chapter of Ourano Pointers has begun. Ten puppies to develop and mould. Ten names. Ten stories. One litter. One kennel. One man. One sky.

Ourano Pointers —
Rhodes, Eastern Cape Highlands, South Africa.
🏔️🤍🙏🏼

05/08/2026

This is Baggio and Saxo sharing a find on a covey of
Greywing Francolin.

I never hunt a property blindly, no matter how promising it looks. The groundwork comes first - months of counting, marking coveys on the GPS, learning how many birds a slope actually holds, and only then deciding whether it can carry a commercial hunt at all.

Often the answer is no. If the coveys are on the smaller side, I don't shoot them. You cannot control four hunters each taking a bird from a covey that can't afford to lose four. So instead I manage them, give them time, and let them get to where they should be.

That was this property. Promising, but not ready. I had the ground to hunt elsewhere, so I left it alone for the season.

I came back in a gap to count birds and work some young dogs, and found every covey on one ridge decimated. Ten to fifteen birds down to three to five.
Not one covey - all of them.

Predation doesn't do that. Snow doesn't do that.

Spent cartridges. Broken boundary fences. Spoor leading in and out.

The cartridges are bagged. The fence breach is photographed and logged. The GPS carries months of dated counts from before, and the counts from after.

Crossing a fence to shoot birds you didn't count, on ground that isn't yours, isn't hunting. It's theft - from the landowner, and from every bird that would have bred next spring.

People assume poaching runs along colour lines. In my world that is the furthest thing from the truth.

I have walked these mountains hard, I know them intimately. The kind landowners who let me in did so because I count first and shoot second, or don't shoot at all. That trust took a long time to build. It won't be undone by men who couldn't be bothered to learn what a covey is worth.

31/07/2026

End of the season. Snow on the peaks, birds still scattered in the grass all around us, and dogs that never once let me down. It was busy, it was frantic, but it was good. The busiest yet — our first full season at Ouranopolis — and I am both grateful and humbled. We put on a show when it mattered most, through snow and rain and even uncharacteristically warm winter days.

Now we prep for 2027. Grow the team, sharpen the next generation, survey and manage the birds as we always have — because without them, there is no business. And I keep my anti-poaching hat firmly on, policing these slopes and stopping those who would r**e the land and pillage all before them. I’ve got my eyes on you. Justice will prevail.

The mountains remain. And so do we.

Address

Ross Street
Senqu

Telephone

+27848943950

Website

http://www.ouranopointers.com/, https://shootingsportsman.com/pointers-in-africa/, https://www.orvis.com/product/ourano-

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Ourano Pointers posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.