John Bailey – The Kingfisher Diaries
January 18th 2010
The Week That Rocked My World
My annual expedition to India has just been and gone. For ten, twelve or is it more years, I've been taking groups out there, don south, to one of the last real reserves of the great golden mahseer. Normally, we do well enough. Most of the guys get their twenties, thirties and even forties. Most years we catch fish in excess of fifty. Every now and again we might pop a seventy or an eight. Massive fish, a huge achievement.
But this year, though, was extraordinary. Many twenties, a hatful of thirties, three or was it four forties, a fifty, four sixties, an eighty and a stunning fish just short of the hundred pound mark.
Day after day, there were just more and more fish coming. I was being summoned up and down the river to take the trophy shots, morning, noon and well into the night. Emotions ran high. For several of the group, these really were the best days of their fishing life.
But why was it so good this year? Perhaps we stumbled on the fish, a great build up of big mahseer in one of the massive pools. Perhaps it was that they were feeding hard, beginning to appreciate the advent of warm weather. Perhaps we fished better than normal - young Dave certainly was in his own, fishing better than I've ever seen him. And that's saying a lot. Perhaps we had luck on our side. Perhaps every piece of the piscatorial jigsaw decided to fall into place.
And, interestingly, this year we were trying new tricks. Different types of bait. Different rigs. Different lines. Perhaps we were just that little bit ahead of our normal game.
Looking, now, at the pictures it's not hard to understand the appeal of mahseer. Their sheer size. Their intelligence. Their massive reserves of power. These are the super-carp of the fishing world. Check out http://www.angling-travel.com/ for more news on this extraordinary trip.
And now it's back to slowly-unfreezing Norfolk. How do you reconcile your ambitions after a trip like this? One minute you're photographing massive, glorious, hundred pound freshwater fish. Then, a week later, you're hoping the river will fine down enough to yield a five pound chub or a one and a half pound roach. Why would you want to even bother? But you do. The strange thing is you appreciate every fish in its setting. In India, you use fish the size of a specimen dace for a bait but over here you totally adore them for what they are. Over there, you're using fifty pound breaking strain line for a fish that runs like a steam train. Here, three pound line is stretched to the limit by a chub double that weight. Everything is relative. Everything has its merits. An angler who is tired of any type of fishing is an angler tired of life itself, I guess.