John Bailey – The Kingfisher Diaries
November 12th 2009
Crystal Rivers
I've just come back from fishing a Himalayan river for mahseer. I'm a lucky so and so I know so it might help ease your pain if I tell you from the outset I didn't catch a fish. I managed to hook two or three but was smashed each time with contemptuous ease. Shows how much I know!
One of the many interesting things was the fact that I left the River Wensum as low and clear as I've ever seen it and found the river five thousand miles to the east almost identically gin-like. It seemed that I had travelled half way across the world to fish for spooked mahseer instead of spooked chub and roach.
However, because of the light over in India, it was possible to watch the reaction of the fish much more clearly than back in dear old Norfolk. Let me give you this example.
I'm watching half a dozen big mahseer in a pool not much bigger than Lyng Mill. One of the camp boys is walking up the river towards me with a bottle of beer...can't grumble about that! However, his footing is unguarded and, a hundred yards away, he kicks over a largish rock. I hear it and so do the mahseer. They're gone. They're over to the big rocks in deep water on the far side of the pool and they don't come out for three hours or so. Think about this. Think about your approach to any river here in the UK. Mahseer are no cleverer than chub or barbel it's just that in this light I can see exactly what I often only guess at in the UK.
Let's have another example. I'm fishing a small live bait tethered by a normal UK type lead. I'm using twenty-five pound line straight through. The mahseer see the fluttering bait but they won't come near. It's not until I change the lead for a stone from the riverbed and scale down to fifteen pound breaking strain that I get a take. Hence the lost fish. That mahseer was, I guess, barely twenty pounds but if you think barbel go, then you can think again until you've been to the north of India. That fish's 0 to 60 speed would have made a Ferrari blink.
The life of a truly wild fish - whether chub or mahseer - is fraught with dangers. Think about a chub. As a fingerling, it can be picked off by just about anything - its parents, herons, grebes, pikelets, kingfishers...the lot. As a smaller fish, our chublet is incredibly attractive to cormorants, pike and otters. As a large fish, otters and anglers are ever-present dangers. Similarly in India. All the rock pools were alive with pin-sized mahseer. God knows how many dangers they have to face before becoming a twenty, thirty or fifty pound fish. And it's worse in India. There is still netting and dynamiting. There are four types of kingfisher! There are otters there, too. And even crocodiles. But of course, that's the lure of wild fish east or west: chub or mahseer, to catch a specimen will always be as good as it gets.