MR TURDO RIDES AGAIN

DRAWN BACK THERE BY THE TIGERFISH AND THE YELLOWFISH - 17 YEARS AFTER HE LEFT TANZANIA TUDOR CARADOC-DAVIES RETURNED AS A DIFFERENT MAN. ONE WITH A SCORE TO SETTLE AT MAJESTIC RIVERS (MAJESTICRIVERS.COM)

Photos. Tudor Caradoc-Davies, Alisdair Grassie

Have you ever had one of those Sliding Doors moments? It’s a bit weird to mention the one shining light in Gwyneth Paltrow’s movie oeuvre in a fishing story, I know, but bear with me.

I swear I’m not trying to flog second-hand Goop yoni eggs.

The film’s premise is about what happens when you make a critical, life decision. In the case of Paltrow’s character, it centres on what happens if she boards a London Underground train. The story splits in two: one version where she boards the train, and the other where she doesn’t … and what happens thereafter.

The one Sliding Doors moment I have always had when it comes to fly fishing, comes from when I lived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2005. That was a great year. I went straight from studying journalism at Rhodes University to working as a re-write sub on The Citizen newspaper in Dar, polishing Swanglish (Swahili-English) articles into something resembling the Queen’s English. Career-wise, it was deep end, bomb drop stuff. Upon arrival I was given three columns straight off the bat, including being Tanzania’s first restaurant reviewer under the pseudonym, Shadrack Malimbo (the first name and surname chosen randomly from the phone book). Shadrack aside, at the newspaper I was known as ‘Mr Turdo’, because the security guards struggled with ‘Mr Tudor’. On the social front it was a heady time too. I lived with my professional hunter buddy Ryan Wienand and his wife Lise and embraced the rumsoaked haze of ex-pat life in Dar, punctuated by weekends in Zanzibar and occasional trips to the Serengeti or other national parks like Lake Tarangire and Mikumi. After a brilliant year, I left to pursue jobs in the glossy magazine industry back in Cape Town, South Africa. That was my Sliding Doors moment.

Three months after I left the country, Ryan appeared on the cover of The Complete Fly Fisherman magazine with the biggest tigerfish I had ever seen. It turned out that, shortly after I left, he discovered that his hunting concessions in the Selous happened to have massive tigerfish. As a result, the scene around the Kilombero area changed as Kilombero North Safaris and African Waters developed the operations that are so well known today.

A lot of water has passed through Tanzanian rivers since then. Ryan and Lise have three kids and, having left hunting. He’s now a big dog in heavy industry in Tanzania with what looked like the president on speed dial. Me? Well, older, greyer, balder, fatter and now the editor of The Mission, the route this version of TurdoGwyneth took has worked out well. Still, for the 17 years since I left Tanzania, not a week has gone by where I have not thought about what would have happened if I had stuck around a little longer, if I had been there when Ryan struck into those first Tanzanian tigers, if I had not climbed aboard Gwyneth’s train.

From the guests’ tents and the bar/dining area at Majestic Rivers, you can watch yellows rise and hippos feed right in front of you.

3am, Julius Nyerere International Airport, Dar es Salaam.

I was waiting outside Arrivals looking for a brand new LandCruiser driven by a guy called Mudi with a passenger also called Mudi. They explained later that people differentiate between them by calling one Mudi Bonge (Swahili for Round Mudi or Fat Mudi) and the other is Mudi Speedi (Fast Mudi). They were driving the beer supply truck heading to the Majestic Rivers camp in the Selous and the plan was for me to catch a ride on it.

It was weird to be back and, while the night time humidity of Dar and the general shape of the airport was familiar, everything else seemed shiny, modern and new. Dar looked like it had undergone a massive facelift: the airport upgraded, the city booming and potholed roads replaced with sleek tarred highways. Keeping an eye on the security boom for the truck and blinking my eyes awake, it was hard to believe that this was actually happening. The trip came together quickly. In September I mentioned (ever-so-subtly) to Ryan that if we were ever going to get to fish for Tanzanian tigers together, it should probably happen sooner rather than later, because my wife Ingrid was heavily pregnant with our twins and, well, that kind of thing changes fishing plans. Man of action that he is, Ryan called Keven Stander who owns Majestic Rivers Lodge on the banks of the Kilombero River in the Selous. Keven is a legendary Tanzanian hotelier and restaurateur. When this area of the Selous got rezoned from a hunting concession to a conservation area, Keven realised the massive potential of the fishery and took over the lodge from the outgoing hunters. Together, Ryan and Keven set up a long weekend’s fishing for a crowd of mates from Dar es Salaam, some of whom I knew back in the day. It also happened to be Ryan’s birthday, hence the beer truck. I had the option of flying in with the others on the Friday morning, but, if I opted for a twelve hour drive with the Mudis, it would get me one or two more sessions on the water. Considering I was coming all the way from South Africa, I figured I could not waste a day sweating in Dar. If everything went according to plan, I’d have the Thursday afternoon and Friday morning sessions, before the rest arrived. We would then have Friday afternoon, the whole of Saturday, and Sunday morning fishing together before flying out. When the invitation finally came, it was just in time as Ingrid was seven and a half months pregnant, which is like three hundred weeks or something. I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the message from her was clear, “Go now, poephol, because very soon you won’t be going anywhere for a while. And come back alive.”

Once the Mudis and I got acquainted and the truck worked its way out of Dar es Salaam in the early morning hours, I proceeded to nod off. From Dar through Morogoro, Mikumi, the sugarcane farms of Kilombero and to the Msolwa sector border of the Selous, I dreamt on and of tigerfish, my unborn children and my past life as Shadrack/Turdo.

We arrived in camp just in time for me to squeeze in a quick 6-weight session at a section of river called the Golf Course with guide Alisdair Grassie and Lionel Song, the head guide and a seasoned veteran of fly fishing and

Guide Lionel Song points our cruising Mnyera yellowfish to Terry Calavrias.

African travel. We waded thigh-deep across a channel and then worked our way up the middle of the river hopping between islands topped with short grass and skinny runs. Spotting tailing yellows in runs and small pools and nymphing for them or using small streamers, this kind of fishing is a Vaal River fly angler’s wet dream. I was assured that, because the water is too fast and rocky, it was not ideal croc territory. Plus, they had never seen a croc in that area. We stayed vigilant all the same because, well, no one wants to go out that way and I had new reasons to live. The decision to drive in paid off on the first cast when I caught a midget Alestes on a rubber-legged woolly bugger nymphed into a run. My line got caught in a low branch so when I struck the fish flew through the air and then swung towards me like bait to a cartoon cat. Similar to a tigerfish in shape and colouration, but with strange human-like dentures, I had hoped to catch one of these so this was an amazing start. New species – tick! After a solid on/off from a much bigger fish (a yellow I would tussle with three times over the next three days in the exact same spot), a few casts later into a pool teaming with rises and chases, I caught another unexpected midget, a chessa. It’s a fish I’ve only seen photos of in the Zambezi system many hundreds of kilometres south. Another new species - tick! After adding a small tiger to my spree, with the monkey off my back, I returned to camp with spirits buoyed and settled in for drinks and dinner by the river. As the fire crackled and Lionel regaled us with hilarious stories, the sun dipped below the horizon and the hippos came in closer to graze. The kitchen, marshalled by hospitality expert Peta-Lynn O’Brien (usually with Shamwari in the Eastern Cape), served up the most incredible ox-tail I have ever had. Soon, all the travel caught up with me and I tapped out for the evening.

“What do you mean you support both Glasgow and Edinburgh!?! That’s like supporting Man U AND Arsenal, the Bulls AND the Stormers.”

The guide, Alisdair, is quite possibly the nicest person I have ever met. He says he’s a Scot, and I believe that’s what his passport might say, but his accent is lighter than a deep fried Twinkie, probably due to his upbringing in Hong Kong. He’s studying agriculture and getting practical experience on some of the big farms in Tanzania so guiding at Majestic Rivers is something he does when the plants or cows don’t need him. He clearly loves the country and the whole African experience, running around barefoot

like a khaki-clad Mowgli, revelling in the intense heat and generally beaming at the sheer brilliance of being alive. I discover that, like me, he’s into rugby so, as we set off from camp on foot that first full day, I attempted to find out if, beneath the beaming pleasantness, there’s a dirk hidden in the sporran for enemies of his sporting clan in the United Rugby Championship.

Nothing going. He loves all rugby, all teams, everyone. He loves the bush and the animals and he LOVES fishing. The man is ujamaa and ubuntu all rolled into one.

While the others were still flying in from Dar es Salaam in a Cessna 208 Caravan loaded with extra beer (a onehour hop vs my 12-hour road slog), Alisdair and Francis the AK-47-toting TANAPA (Tanzanian National Parks) askari accompanied me downstream from camp to try find some fish.

It took time to get to grips with the fact that I was now walking in the fabled Selous. This is one of the last truly remote, wild places on earth and it is absolutely enormous. The largest game reserve in Africa, at 55 000 km², the Selous is the size of Croatia. From the gate of the Msolwa sector it took us over three hours through the park just to get to the lodge and aside from a truck doing controlled burns close to the gate, we did not see another vehicle the whole time.

As we walked along the jeep track that morning following the river’s bends, there were signs (tons of dung) that a buffalo herd had recently passed through. Lanky sallowfaced Yellow baboons raced through the trees while bushbuck stood still, banking on camouflage over panicked pace for survival. To access the river we threaded our way down to the river using heavily rutted hippos paths, careful not to turn an ankle in the leaf-covered, platter-sized divots their footprints left in the dried mud.

The day’s fishing began at a large pool called Egg Rock. When the sun came out from behind the clouds the tigers started to move. After about thirty casts, there was a slight disturbance close in to the rocks I was standing on, so I lobbed a short cast that way. I immediately got a huge surface follow and take from a hefty tiger that, on the second surge, smashed the fly, one of Richard Wale’s wake-pushing Stella patterns. I failed to make the hook stick, but the adrenalin surge and proof of tiger life was enough to keep spirits high.

Moving on to the next spot, Alisdair spotted a black fin belonging to a yellowfish. The fish was across a fast run from us in a back eddy that curled up against a small treelined island the size of a squash court. After fruitlessly trying a couple of Hail Mary casts across the current that landed in the right spot yet had the fly instantly dragged away by the flow, I did what I should have done in the first place. I waded halfway across the run upstream of the eddy and dropped a downstream cast into it, mending

Species abundance with a midget Alestes (above left), a midget Chessa (above right) and an Mnyera yellow (opposite page)

line away from me and extending the 6-weight so the fly stayed in the slack water of the eddy for longer. The black fin moved aggressively in the direction of the beadhead orange-legged dragonfly imitation LeRoy Botha had tied for me and, without even really needing to strike, I was on. After a short yet violent fight made all the more difficult by the fish’s substantial rudder, I brought it in to a quiet eddy on my side of the channel where Alisdair swooped with the net. High fives commenced as I marvelled at the Avatar-like oddity, took a few pics and released it. Alisdair’s positive vibes were definitely rubbing off as I was tempted to break into song with Toto’s Africa.

As for the yellow, I’m still not sure what to call that fish. I asked Ed Truter, the veteran location scout for African Waters, about this species before the trip and suggested, ‘Selous Yellow’. Ed is famously into detail. Whether it’s rigging intricacies or the taxonomic names for fish, he likes to nerd out. Somewhat surprisingly, yellowfish have him stumped.

He said, “The issue is that yellowfish are on what scientists call a ‘species flock’ where there’s just this incredible genetic continuum across the continent. So the question is, ‘where on the continuum does this fish lie?’ And, is it even important to know that? The genetic diversity and their individuality is pretty mind-blowing, so I have got to the point of accepting that we just don’t know exactly what each fish is. For the fish that we catch in Cameroon, Niger barb is a name that works because it is in the Niger basin, but even that fish is considered to be part of a species flock. For Tanzania, something just like Mnyera barb, if it’s a dominant species in the bigger basin, would make the most sense because, honestly, I don’t think anyone knows what that fish is.”

An hour or two after catching my Jason Bourne yellow, two Land Cruisers pulled up loaded with beer, and with Keven the lodge owner and the rest of the crew. Ryan, Terry, James, Frans and Griff who are all in business in Tanzania, Kevin the head of Standard Bank Tanzania and Dave the former head of FNB Tanzania, now back in SA. We divided into teams and fished late into the afternoon in the baking heat, focusing mainly on catching tigers.

By the end of the day, I’d covered around 20km on foot and was feeling uber relaxed from the beers, the heat and the stoke of catching some fish. As we drove back to camp in the crimson gloaming, I was in the back seat of one of the vehicles with the two bankers and about twenty tsetse flies, with Lionel driving and Ryan in the front passenger seat. Suddenly Ryan, the former professional hunter, told Lionel to stop the car as he’d seen fresh drag marks crossing the road and leading into the bushes heading down to the river. He and Lionel exited the car and approached a nearby thicket, one that I had walked past that very morning to get to the river. They calmly told the three of us, still sitting in the back, that they could see a young male lion on an extremely fresh buffalo kill and asked, “Do we want to see it?”

Even without a gun, Ryan and Lionel know the bush bloody well, they can read an animal’s body language and can handle themselves. Kevin, Dave and I sit at desks for a living.

Big or small, cats are notorious arseholes. Bankers assess risk.

I think of my wife and her belly.

Three heads shake in unison.

Nope.

“We’ve only really explored about ten percent of what’s there.”

That’s something Stu Harley said before the trip while trying to describe how vast this system is. Before I left I’d grilled him about what to expect, the species found there and how to fish it. Stu spent years further upstream on the Kilombero with African Waters and has subsequently been working with Majestic Rivers to unlock this fishery. At first I did not really understand why they would name the place Majestic Rivers. Is it one river? Several rivers? Are they all majestic? In the few short days I was there, the name began to make more sense. The lodge itself sits on the banks of the Kilombero River and each guest tent plus the main bar/boma/dining area are all right on the water. You can see a couple of hundred metres across the yellowfish-filled braids and rocks to the other side of the river except, the other side is not actually the other side, but an island. If you cross to that island you will find another section of river and more islands, because the Kilombero forks and twists and braids and reforms more times than alliances at an ANC elective conference. It’s a properly discombobulating, almost delta-like abundance of water to fish.

Lionel, Stu, Keven and Alisdair have explored quite a bit without guests and are positively frothing at what they have on their hands, because there are tributaries, side channels and sections teeming with fish (large tigers, chunky yellows, massive Vundu and Bagrid catfish) that see zero fishing pressure. As they develop the fishery, the plan is to leave boats in strategic places to cross sections of river so that anglers can move between the different islands and explore new water both on day trips and to set up fly camps for multi-day exploration. There’s more to the area than just game and fish. While exploring, Keven and Lionel have come across a bunch of ancient pottery in significant enough quantities to excite archaeologists about earlier civilisations that were established here. Whatever this settlement was called I bet, like Carthage, Pompeii and Great Zimbabwe, they thought they would be around forever. But right now, there are no people. There’s just us, vast stretches of big game country, split by fish-filled rivers, migratory routes and the odd dirt road. With a day and half left, choices had to be made. Upstream from the camp there are deep sections that you can fish from a boat. That’s where you are most likely to get the bigger tigerfish. With more time, I’d have liked to check that out, but having ticked my other big goal - the psychedelic, blueish, red-eyed yellowfish - what I wanted more than anything from the time remaining, was to catch a respectable Tanzanian tigerfish on foot. Alisdair decided to take Terry, myself, FNB Dave and Standard Bank Kevin on a day out to the confluence of the Luwego Rvier and the Kilombero. We drove about an hour

downstream along the Kilombero till we got below the cascades of Shaghuli Falls where we transferred our clobber into a boat, crossed the deep water of the gorge and hiked a few kilometres up the other side to the confluence. It’s a unique set-up. The Luwego runs in clear from the south, while the Kilombero runs through the forested islands in a series of mini waterfalls from the north-west. They come together in a string of pools where you can see the colour line where the two rivers meet. The idea is to stand in the sandy shallows of the Luwego side and cast towards the waterfalls of the Kilombero side where the tigers ambush baitfish along the colour line. Like when you cough to let someone know the airport toilet stall you’re in is occupied, a pod of hippos grunted warnings at us. They were just 50-100m away so I did some mental calculations about which rock I would attempt to run to if a massive bow wave appeared heading in my direction. There were even more, pink and grey rocks, snoozing among the trees above the waterfalls. We were all packing hangovers from the previous night’s skop. Standard Bank Kevin forgot to bring a rod so I lent him a spare and we spread out. An hour or two later Alisdair popped up near me to tell me that Kevin lost a great fish near the main pod of hippos. As I bombed a full cast out right into the white water of one of the Kilombero’s mini-waterfalls, I began to lament to Alisdair that I have not had a nudge all morning when my fly got slammed on the first strip and a fish appeared to jump 15m away from where the fly landed. It was a decent size fish, but the line started to go limp as it turned to swim towards me. I ran backwards across the shallow water trying not to get stuck in the sinking sand coming in from the Luwego, which caused Francis the askari to wake up from a heat-induced snooze. Jambo Rafiki! Once I got tension back on the line, after a short, furious fight, I beached the fish in the shallows. Unlike the juveniles I’d already caught, this fish was mature enough to have that blue adipose fin unique to Tanzanian tigerfish. It wouldn’t break any records nor make the cover of a mag, but caught on foot in this Edenlike setting amid waterfalls and hippos, it gave me the release I’d waited 17 years for.

The rest of the day was similarly satisfying. While Dave and Terry pillaged the tigerfish nursery and also caught a solid

yellow on a Clouser, Kevin got a good tiger with the final cast of the day. I managed to catch two Bagrid catfish and two more tigers similar in size to the first – one sighted, stalked and caught between a sandbank and a waterfall. I also got stuck into something much bigger in the bottom or a rocky pool, either a large Bagrid or a vundu, which just sat there shaking its head till the fly pulled when I applied pressure.

Hyenas came through camp whooping in the night. By the looks of how our troops emerged groggy and went straight for liquids and a fry up breakfast, all our whoops had been used up the night before. Tender, we fished the morning session at the nearby Golf Course. I teamed up with Terry and Lionel to stalk some big yellows, but our balance was off and we wiped out on snotty rocks and caught fokkol. One channel over, I could see and hear Ryan screaming blue murder at the yellows that were tormenting him until he got a big one to stick on a small GSP tied for largemouth yellows. He whooped like a hyena with joy. The fish of the weekend, with a blue head, green back, black dorsal fin, yellow tail and red eye, it was not, as Gwyneth’s ex Chris Martin of Coldplay sings, ‘All yellow’. On the way out of the river and up to the road, Ryan made a different highpitched sound when he almost stepped on a small Egyptian spitting cobra hiding in one of those hippo divots. Lionel grabbed it to give us a quick herpetology lesson before we returned to the lodge, packed up and drove to the airstrip, arriving as the Caravan touched down. The pilot flew us over the water we had been fishing, giving me a chance to piece together where the Kilombero flows, becomes Shughuli Falls and meets the Luwego. Approximately thirty seconds after the plane gained altitude, I nodded off, happy, hungover, spent and satisfied. The reveal of this fishery is still unfolding. The bigger tigers are in the deeper sections but also in the small pools where Keven caught several on plastic frogs while we were there. The Selous/Mnyera yellows, arguably a bigger drawcard for those with a love for the Labeo family (i.e most South African fly anglers), are there in numbers and size along with a couple of other yellowfish species. They provide you with shots, anguish and just enough victory to keep coming back. The Bagrid and Vundu catfish are easily targeted but not so easily landed, while the Alestes, the Chessa and even the fabled fruitarian Ndungu will all reveal themselves more frequently in time. After all, there’s still 90% left of this fishery to explore. I can now confirm that this place, the Selous, these rivers and these fish – all of it IS majestic. It’s also magical in that Sliding Doors magic realism kind of way. I’d say it gave me closure on my 17-year itch, but that would imply that I’m done.

I’m not.

As soon as I can, I’ll be on the next train, plane or beer truck heading back there.

Bagrid catfish (above) and Vundu are other species on the menu. Avoid other residents like Egyptian Spitting Cobras.