Tudor Caradoc-Davies
“V” IS FOR VENDETTA
A
few years back, I was at the Hotel Tropicana in Libreville with Conrad Botes. We’d caught an early flight in from Port Gentil and had an entire day to burn until our evening flight back home to South Africa from Gabon. Eventually, after breakfast, lunch and beers had been had, all available Wi-fi absorbed and all the moments of the trip relived again and again, we grew bored. Then the lizards came out to play. This was not a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas lizard encounter, but rather the super inquisitive agama-type lizards you find all over the show. They’d run up towards us and like frat boys with not much to offer the world other than gym-boet physiques, they’d do a few push-ups and then run off again. Flick a piece of bread into the arena however and all that flexing became functional as they would wrestle for the spoils. Cue hours of fun with us ‘casting’ imaginary rods, with flies made of bread, and ‘hooking’ lizards. You must understand… beers had been consumed and it had been a tough trip. I’ve been thinking about those lizards quite a lot since then. And fish, as per usual. Mainly, it’s been about what constitutes a viable fly fishing quarry? Who decides that? And why do some fish not even get a look-in? Historically, it’s been trout and we, as fly anglers, have been happy (delighted in fact) to catch them in any size, shape or form. But, especially over the last century, fly fishing has become a lot more omnivorous, with anglers targeting everything in the fresh and the salt from marlin and tarpon (why we were in Gabon) to Cape kurper and goldfish. You get the occasional oddball who finds something unusual to nerd out over, like Jimmy Eagleton with geelbek, Leonard Flemming with a redfin minnow slam and UK carp fly nut, Jamie Sandford, who often picks up a midget heathen stick to throw miniature plastics at pinky-sized fish. There is however one fish that seems to have had an invisibility cloak draped over it for centuries because, as far as I know, no one aside from the subsistence fisherman of the Indian city of Bhavnagar on the Gulf of Khambat, seems to target them. I’m talking about the mudskippers. Hang on, don’t roll your eyes just yet, because this might just be the ultimate fly fishing challenge in the flyweight division.
Photo Lip Kee/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
What about the size? Well, it depends which mudskipper you’re targeting, but they can get up to 30cm in length. I’ve seen people platz over brook trout a third of that size. Variety? Like triggerfish or the trevally family, there’s a bunch of different types (32 at last count). Take your pick from the giant, Atlantic, common, blue-spotted, barred and many others. Now for the challenges (of which there are many). For a start, consider where they live … in mangrove swamps. To catch one of these little blighters you will have to drag yourself (à la Passchendaele) across a mudflat but, in doing so, you run the risk of being seen. In fact, to not be seen by a mudskipper you will have to become the stealthiest ninja to ever bomb or perhaps a Golem made of mud, because not only do their eyes move independently of one another, but they have an almost 360 degrees field of vision so they’ll see you coming. Their vision is also better out of water than underwater because these weirdos are amphibious, spending about 90% of their time out of water, sunning their guns. They can also climb trees, so if your back cast is super shit and you get stuck in a mangrove at least you might be able to catch a dopey one.
First things first, let’s deal with the basics. Is it a fish? Yes. Does it eat things? Yes. Could those things - worms, crickets, flies, meal worms, beetles, small fish and small crustaceans – be represented by flies? Yes, we already do that for many other species.
While we don’t live anywhere near a mangrove swamp, we think it’s high time the greater fly fishing community put a bounty on the mudskippers’ head. Instead of running a marathon, catching a big trout (yawn) or doing what everyone else is doing, we’d like to challenge you to tick one of these little bastards off.
So far so good. Mudskippers are already better qualified than some existing fly targets based purely on the diversity of their diets.
A case of beer to the first person to do it on fly in 2022 (photo evidence and your story required)!
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