As browsers of this website will know, one of the targets I set myself many years ago was to catch a freshwater fish weighing in excess of 100 pounds. Even for a specialist freshwater angler, there aren't a lot of locations nor for that matter species capable of satisfying that ambition. A quest made all the more difficult that as a sea angler, I wanted to achieve it with the minimum of time investment and fuss. So I pondered long and hard as to how best this might be done and concluded that Africa held the most promise. The species I felt was most likely to come at the 100 pounds plus mark for me was the Nile perch. The question was, which venue to choose.
Around the time I was looking to do something about actively taking this particular challenge head on, articles started appearing in the magazines about specialist week long Nile perch trips to Lake Nasser in Egypt. This sounded just the ticket. People were coming back with some really huge specimens, along with all the usual tales of even better fish hooked up and lost. But what you rarely if ever read or hear about is the other side of the coin. Not everyone catches such huge fish, and depending on the type of trip you book, your chances can be reduced still further for reasons which are totally outside of your control.
Most of the bigger fish come from trips using a fixed location base camp over-looking a known hot spot. But to get on one of those trips, certainly with the people I booked with, you had first to have experienced one of their more nomadic week long safari type trips. To appreciate what these trips are like, you first need to visualise the geography of the place. At 2400 square miles, Lake Nasser is huge. But it isn't a natural lake and nor does it even look much like a lake. It is actually a flooded expansion of the Nile held back by the Aswan Dam, which because of the steep hilly rocky nature of much of the dessert to the south of Aswan has produced a long, wide, deep stilled expanse named after Colonel Nasser who ran the place for a while.
We flew in to Luxor then on to Aswan. We didn't have a lot of free time in either, but from the few hours we did have, I certainly wouldn't want to visit the place again for anything other than the fishing. The next morning we had to be up at 4 am to join a military protected coach convoy taking tourists to Abu Simbel close to the border with Sudan which was our meeting point with the boats. Every time I think of that journey, the wacky races spring to mind. It started off orderly enough. Then driving in the dark along an unlit dessert track, everyone started breaking rank and making a dash for it. It the early morning light we passed dozens of old wrecked abandoned vehicles. The one big plus about our journey, or so I thought, was that we would be making most of the homeward leg by boat.
The boats we okay, though not what you would call a sea worthy design. On a lake you wouldn't think that would matter much, but on a few occasions it did quite rough. Two of the boats were for fishing. The third was filled with supplies and used by our Nubian guides. All three were made from steel, which is very important there as much of the shore line of the lake in steep and rocky. There were small sandy bays here and there which we would use to set up camp. However, a lot of these were frequented by crocodiles which had nests nearby. Quite often in the night you would hear the crocs thrashing about in the water between the moored boats.
The sleeping options were either to stay on the boat, or use a camp bed on the beach. I would say it was probably a 50'50 split across the two. We chose to sleep on the boats, which judging by the numbers of dog like foot prints throughout the camp each morning was probably the wisest decision. In addition to this, after dark, scorpions were particular numerous, and while we were shore fishing one day, one of the lads stood on a large loose boulder from which a cobra emerged that had been sheltering from the sun. But nobody got bitten or stung. Insects were not a problem either. We didn't even end up with stomach problems through getting our water straight from the lake. The biggest threat was the sun which was relentlessly hot.
The best of the Nile perch fishing seems to be early morning and late evening going on into the dark. A lamp would be left on the campsite beach as a beacon for the evening sessions. And while live tilapia are reputedly a very good bait for catching really big Nile perch, all our efforts went into trolling deep diving plugs such as rapala's, shad raps and butcher raiders in the 6 to 9 inch range. Obviously this covers a lot more ground and theoretically a lot more fish than a fixed location live bait. But the real reason why we did so much trolling was that we were on the move all the time. We had to cover the distance between Abu Simbal and our collection point over the 5 days. And while we were technically fishing throughout the day, we were not taking much in the way of fish.
Any real fishing we did was either the couple of hours unto breakfast before heading off to the next camp, or in the evening around dusk when we had arrived. On the few occasions when we were given free time ashore to take off along the rocks, we had what was to my mind the best fishing of the whole trip. Using large spoons armed only with a single 6/0 hook to a short wire trace we took some absolutely fantastic tiger fish. You would be fishing a patch of deep open water watching your spoon coming in with nothing else anywhere in sight. Then just before you was about to lift it out for another cast, a torpedo would coming screaming towards it from absolutely nowhere, hit it, then take to the air in a single move over the period of what seemed like a fraction of a second.
I've caught tiger fish in other parts of the word and never tire of them. But these fish were big. Averaging around 8 pounds, with quite a few pushing and going into double figures, they are more than a match for anything else that swims in terms of fighting abilities. We hooked quite a few Nile perch in the same weight bracket too which fought like wet sacks by comparison. Interestingly we didn't latch on to too many tiger fish while we were on the move, and none to my recollection on plugs. Always the spoons. Similarly, the Nile perch were almost exclusively taken on plugs. One day I even managed a short stint on the fly using heavy goldhead lure to wire on which I managed to pick up a few small tiger fish in a quite little backwater. Had we been at a permanent week long base camp, other opportunities to experiment would have been open to us.
The best of the Nile perch fishing most certainly came in the late afternoon through into the dark. Dave Devine had a nice one of 71 pounds. But other than that we struggled really to get above 40 pounds. Don't get me wrong, we had plenty of fish. But not the ones were had gone expecting either to catch or at least see. And yet, the other party that had flown out with us to spend a week at the permanent base camp had several fish over the 100 pounds including some even from the shore. So while a safari type trip might appear to include 5 days of actual fishing, and while you will have lures in the water for much of that time, the question has to be asked, are you really fishing. To my mind it was traveling. An interesting experience with some outstanding fishing for tiger fish, but overall, disappointing. There are other venues with a much realistic chance of the freshwater ton such as the Canadian white surgeon.
