Very Coarse Fishing

How as a young tea planter JONNY NIBLETT enjoyed some great fishing, but perhaps not as we know it.

When I told my parents that I was off to become a tea planter, my father gave a great sigh of relief and my mother phoned a family friend who had been in the Indian Railways. “Well,” he said, “he will have a wonderful life but will never be a rich man.”

The old boy was quite right. In Tanganyika young assistant managers in the fifties lived a pretty frugal life on a healthy diet of local produce plus basic groceries from the Indian shop in the village. Everyone made their own bread, or, that is, the cook did, in the filthy and greasy black shed that passed for a kitchen. Managers could afford more luxury provisions bought in Iringa 80 miles down the old murrram North South road.

But trout were there on the estates, as were duck, francolin and small buck. Mufindi was paradise for any countrybred boy. The only shortage was women but then in those days celibacy was common and expected and anything else was frowned on.

Mufindi comprised of great montane forests along the escarpment edge where are the ten company tea estates, and these merge into rolling grasslands and swamps; all waiting to be explored. New species were being found and only ten years ago a partridge and also a monkey were discovered that were new to science.

The place was a botanists’ heaven. Few books were available on the birds, small mammals and fish. “East Africa” seemed to end on the Kenya border and not until the sixties were we able to identify some of the oddities in our game bags. The old tiger colonels who farmed on the grasslands talked of yellow fish in the Little Ruaha but it was not until a hungover wing forward coming home from a rugger match in Iringa lent over the bridge at Mafinga and saw a shoal of fish that we began to catch any.

The river was very high but running crystal-clear, it being April and nearing the end of the wet season. That year Mary caught the biggest at 7lb (women fishers?!) and we learnt that the fish ran up to our local reaches from 30 miles downstream as soon as the waters were high enough. We found that at various rocky stretches the locals fixed basket traps facing downstream at the beginning of the rains and at the end of the rains reversed them to catch fish dropping back after spawning.

Of the 30-odd species of freshwater fish that I have seen caught this anadromous barbel was one of the most beautiful and looked a very close relation to Barbus mariae which is found in the longer rivers of Kenya and which Kenya settlers called, rhino fish. When its hoover-like mouth was extended a bone rose up from the top of its nose, hence the name. It was a brilliant green-gold in colour with large scales the size of a half crown, and was very similar to its cousin the Indian Masheer.

Try as we might we could not move them in lowwater during the dry weather and we needed heavy flood water to catch them. This would be during the rains when the forests were cold and dripping wet, so it was good to pack a picnic and head for the sunny grasslands through which the Little Ruaha flowed.

Very small rhino fish would take a fly, but for the bigger ones lying deep down, a large silver spoon was better than either a devon or a dead bait. As soon as they became available large silver No.4 or 5 Mepps were the medicine both for rhino fish and tiger fish. The best rhino, caught in 1988, by David Willoughby, weighed 15lb. I painted a cut-out of it which now looks down dolefully upon him in his Devon study.

All our tackle had to be brought out from UK and I sold it on to members of the Rod & Gun Club. Dozens of heavy spinning leads, lines, wire traces, rod blanks, spools of nylon and bits and pieces of fly-tying equipment were brought back by planters returning from leave or by children coming back from school. With no television or daily papers it was good to sit down to a fly tying session or make up baits and to assemble rods from blanks and kits. Children grew up fast and all needed fishing tackle.

The Little Ruaha is at much the same altitude, about 6,000 feet, as the tea estates but after a hundred miles or so it drops down below Iringa to join the Great Ruaha that runs through the big game areas. This wonderful river is the southern boundary of the Ruaha National Park. Here we could camp on its banks and hunt and fish, always hoping that a mighty tusker would cross over from the National Park. It would have been easy to achieve a Macnab without getting out of bed in the morning: a catfish, a guinea fowl and an impala. But we never tried it, nicer to just watch and not disturb this magic area.

We generally laid up on the riverbank at mid-day and this was the time to fish whether we had been hunting or on a morning game drive in the park. Hunting was closed in 1974 and by this time it was good to go into the National Park with the children. The over-rated and uneatable tiger fish were our usual quarry. Tigers take with a real wallop and after jumping once of twice, and provided the line is kept tight all the time, can be brought in quickly on the stiff rod required to drive the hook home into their bony mouths.

Big game of one sort or another was usually in sight, looking on with disinterested detachment but crocs and hippos were always a problem. We had to make sure that the children were always out of reach of the former. Crocs would sometimes grab a fish as it was being played and after a heavy dead weight on the line all we landed would be a mangled fish. Exactly the same if you were sea fishing with sharks around; just the heads into the boat.

Once when wading ankle deep and casting a fly into deeper water for small tigers and barbus I heard something running through the water behind me. I turned to find a croc, mouth wide open, making straight at me. I smacked the rod tip down in front of its nose and the thing swung around back into deeper water missing me with its tail. I think it found the water too shallow for a determined attack.

We got vague reports of big tigers being caught by strangers but the biggest we recorded was 151/2lb caught by Richard Keeley at Hussmann’s Bridge, a very remote but excellent hunting area. Hussmann was a German timber logger before World War II who had built a bridge over the Great Ruaha to extract his maninga logs. And, yes, you’ve guessed it - his bridge collapsed on the maiden run and Hussman and his lorry are down there still.

Alex Boswell was having a last cast while his boys were packing up camp before leaving for home, when he caught a monster spotted eel, all of 6ft long.

The boys belayed the evil thing about the head and threw it into the back of the Land-Rover together with the rest of the weekend bag. After three hours driving and ten minutes from home there were yells and screams from the rear as the eel woke up and began thrashing and writhing about. The wretched thing was thrown overboard in front of Alex’s factory manager’s house and was never heard of again. The Ruaha really was very coarse fishing.

There is nothing much to say about the rainbow trout which were introduced to Mufindi in 1934. As more and more dams were built to store water for irrigation so members of the fishing club preferred to fish in the dams for the bigger trout which we had originally introduced from the streams. All trout fishing was very strictly fl y only and it was nice to fish the evening rise from 6pm to 7.30pm almost everyday with the choice of half a dozen dams within a quarter of an hour from the house. After 34 years of this I was beginning to feel like Skue’s Mr. Castwell.

Only a few of the 120 dams in the district were suitable for trout and the rest we stocked with large mouth bass. These were great fun on light spinning tackle and were the best eating fish of all. A dozen fingerling bass stocked in a small dam the size of a football pitch would produce great fishing after 18 months. But soon the population would outstrip the food supply; however these smaller fish would provide much needed protein for the local kids and after school you would find them in their school uniform lining the banks with their wattle poles, spey casting their home-made spinners.

When I left Mufindi for good in 1994 the Rod & Gun Club became defunct. I took all the catch registers back to Scotland and they are produced regularly when old planters come up to stay, and names and places emerge from the shadows of memory. What fun it all was.

 
 
 

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