16 minute read
HOUSEBOUND
OKAVANGO
HOUSEBOUND
SWOPPING THEIR HOMES IN RAINY, LOCKED-DOWN CAPE TOWN FOR A HOUSEBOAT ON THE OKAVANGO, TUDOR CARADOC-DAVIES AND CREW FORGOT THE REAL WORLD FOR A MOMENT AND HIT THE BARBEL RUN FOR TIGERFISH.
Photos Platon Trakoshis, Andre van Wyk
The Germans have a word, fernweh, that describes the longing for far-off places you have never been to. It’s made up of fern meaning ‘distance’ and weh(e) meaning ‘ache’ or ‘sickness’. So fernweh combines to mean distance sickness. Basically, it’s the opposite of homesickness. But the interesting part is that it applies to places you have never been to.
I don’t know about you, but over the last 18 months to two years, I have had chronic fernweh. There’s no doubt it was caused in part by lockdowns and the four-walled cabin fever staying at home for far too long brings. Throw in the nowcommon cocktail of anxiety at a seemingly unfathomable plague, severely curtailed travel options and a reeling economy (plus the fly fishing doldrums of a Cape winter), and you have all the makings of ferocious fernweh. So, when Natural Selection who have a spread of incredible camps and mobile safaris in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, got chatting to us, I had an inkling here might be the cure. When they said there was a houseboat on the Okavango panhandle that The Mission could visit for a week to fish, film and shoot the barbel run, it felt like someone deep in the polytheistic bureaucracy of water gods, demi-gods, genies and goblins had heard our prayers.
While I was amped about the fishing to come, I was just as, if not more excited, about the destination itself. For as long as I can remember, I have had deep fernweh for the Okavango. Despite our best intentions and collective fernweh, the trip got off to a disastrous start.
As I left the house to go to the airport, I put my email out-of-office message on but something went haywire. It started responding to thousands of year-old messages with the gleeful announcement that I was going to be in the Okavango for the next week and that all queries would be handled by either my wife, who runs accounts, or The Mission’s art director, Brendan Body. My sleeping wife, whom I had planned on kissing goodbye dramatically before disappearing silently and mysteriously out the door, was not amused that I was leaving her to deal with an administrative crisis.
Then, at the airport, one member of our group was told he could not get on the plane. Platon had had Covid about a month earlier and while his PCR test was positive for Covid, he had been assured by everyone from his doctor, to the Botswanan embassy and the Civil Aviation Authority that, because so much time had passed, he was no longer contagious and he had the green light to travel. SA Airlink were working off different rules, so we boarded the plane one man down. As we took off for much hotter climes, Platon drove off through the rain. I imagine there was a sad trombone solo playing on his car’s sound system. He was determined to get another test hoping for a different result so that he could join us the following day. Just in case, we stole his fly boxes from his pack before he left. In just a few short hours we left cold, rainy Cape Town and were in the baking hot streets of Maun, the safari and Okavango Delta centre of Botswana. Conrad, Dre and myself were picked up by Murray and Bibi of Natural Selection and after a seven-hour drive up to Shakawe, plus a 500m dinghy ride, we boarded the Okavango Spirit. Our home for the week, the Okavango Spirit is a houseboat with seven en-suite cabins with balconies, a large lounge/dining room and a crew consisting of the captain, Sam (who called himself Captain Deadfish), Rasta the chef and Bibi and Lucas who manned the small boats we would be fishing off. Far from mobile reception, my phone dead and all those email problems a world away, my fernweh was rapidly easing. We’d made it. We were in the bloody Okavango!
LIKE A SORT OF WHACK-A-MOLE FLASH MOB OF UNRULY CATFISH, THERE ARE SPORADIC RUNS THAT POP UP IN DIFFERENT PLACES.”
Andre van Wyk with a fin-perfect Okavango tiger above, Tudor Caradoc-Davies testing his own G&Ts on the Okavango Spirit (above right) and Conrad Botes tweaking Clousers for the next day’s fishing (below right).
For those readers from other continents who might not be familiar with the Okavango, let me put my Attenborough hat on and break it down for you. Usually river deltas flow into the sea. Formed by seasonal flooding, the Okavango is one of the world’s few inland deltas and instead of flowing into the sea, it eventually dissipates into the sands of the Kalahari Desert. Around Jan-Feb, the Rio Cubango drains summer rainfall in the Angolan highlands and surges south for over 1200km, across a tiny bit of Namibia (the Caprivi strip) and into Botswana where it becomes the Okavango. From March to June the waters then spread over the delta where the high temperatures cause rapid transpiration and evaporation, which results in not one, not two, but three cycles of rising and falling water levels. Somewhere between June and August (Botswana’s dry winter months) the flood hits its peak and the delta swells to three times its permanent size, attracting animals from all over the region. That’s why it’s a UNESCO world heritage site, one of the seven wonders of Africa and a huge contributor to Botswana’s GDP through safari tourism. Amid this insane concentration of wildlife, from birds to big mammals, are a lot of fish. And what we mean when we talk about fish and the Okavango is barbel. As anglers, we may come for the tigerfish, but it’s the barbel run that makes it all possible. As far as mind-blowing spectacles go, along with the Great Migration of wildebeest in the Serengeti/Masai Mara and the Kasanka bat migration in northern Zambia, the Okavango barbel run is one of the most special natural phenomena on the African continent, or anywhere else for that matter. As the floodplains recede, millions of minnows and baitfish from bulldogs to robbers, Churchills and tilapia that have spawned in the shallows get pushed closer and closer to the deeper channels of the river. As they hide in the papyrus along the channel’s banks, the barbel begin to feed on them, driving the minnows from the safety of the reeds into the channel where tigerfish lurk. Skulking behind the tigerfish and hoping to catch them, were sunburned anglers from Cape Town trying to cope with Botswanan winter temperatures in the high 30s.
Like game rangers sharing significant sightings in the bush, the guides from the various lodges and houseboats in the area talk and share information. Lucas and Bibi got word that the run (a run) was happening further south down at a place called Red Cliffs. That meant a 5:30am start to try to get there as the sun started warming the water up.
When you cruise through the Okavango panhandle on small boats, you’re low in the water so much of the scenery looks the same. Bend after bend of river, flanked by towering banks
of papyrus and phragmites grass, punctuated by occasional openings which reveal cattle and goats, or occasionally elephant and sitatunga antelope with their splayed toes which have evolved for wading in marginal marshy water. Every so often there would be the odd sandbank and lush islands topped with ilala palms and massive hardwood trees, then more bends as the river worked its way much farther south towards the delta proper and the desert.
Red Cliffs, so named for the relatively imposing red earth cliff face, was book-ended by big trees and pitted with hundreds of Carmine bee-eater nests. In a flattish landscape, it stood out as a landmark. The river took a dog-leg to the right below the cliffs forming a deep pool with shallower weedy sections on the outside bend and structure provided by halfsubmerged logs right in the corner. When we arrived there there were already three other boats swearing with joy as they got hit by tigers. That told us everything we needed to know. As we put-putted closer, we could see the water on the margins was alive with action. As bee-eaters swooped above us in their hundreds, we bombed out casts. Tied to the end of our rigs were tiger clousers in black and purple and black and red, Platon’s Bulky beef zonker pattern, plus Henkie Altena’s heavy Ma se Hare, his go-to fly from years spent fishing this area. I’m sure species like Papua New Guinean black bass, dorado etc. have their defenders when it comes to laying claim to podium places, but I’m pretty confident there are few fish, especially in freshwater, that hit as hard at tigerfish do. With the sensitivity of a fly rod, it’s accentuated even more and the thrill of that eat never gets stale. Even the first 15-20 seconds with a smaller fish can be deceptive, because they hit so hard. We had many declarations of, “Proper fish!” only to revise that down to, “Not that big, but it fought ridiculously well for its size.” When the sun gets up and the heat of the day sets in, it’s easy to drift off a little mentally in the rinse and repeat of bombing out casts. Then, out of nowhere, you get poesed and inevitably miss the strike or, worse, trout-strike.
Just as suddenly as the run began, it was over. The boils in the shallows disappeared. Across the pool and down into the channel the water still moved with catfish. They were no longer feeding, but swirling around near the surface, as they moved further downstream as one massive roiling, boiling loosely-conjoined organism of whiskered malice. We returned dog-tired from that first day, our first barbel run experience and a few tigers on the scoreboard, and were greeted by the sight of Platon at the houseboat. As G&Ts washed down Rasta’s hearty meals, Platon brought us up to speed. He’d managed to get another PCR test, one that gave the right result, and had flown in a few hours earlier (throwing up on the plane for dramatic effect) having only lost a day. Platon grew up in Zimbabwe and has fished all across Southern Africa including in the Okavango, so he was by far the most experienced tiger fisherman of the four of us. I’d been on a couple of tigerfish trips before to the Zambezi and Chobe, while Dre had fished for tigers with his late father and had also always wanted to make it to the Okavango. For once Conrad, conqueror of tarpon from the beach and kob from everywhere, was the noob with zero tigerfish experience. Over the days that followed, we understood that there isn’t only one run which, on further reflection, seems obvious. Like a sort of Whack-A-Mole flash mob of unruly catfish, there are sporadic runs that pop up in different places. Why the minnows get smashed in one area instead of another is hard to decipher, but it probably has something to do with water levels, temperature and at least one illtempered catfish deciding to start a riot. The trick is to be there when it starts.
Usually, the giveaway is a bunch of birds – egrets, herons, cormorants – congregating in a specific spot on the edge of the dense banks of papyrus and phragmites grass,
trying to feed on minnows that the barbel have not yet Hoovered. When we saw birds, we’d pull up in the boats to both spot and listen out for the barbel. Yes, listen because, when the barbel are feeding you tend to hear them long before you see them. It sounds like something large, hippos perhaps, moving through the reed and grasses, cracking stems, splashing and bashing smaller fish into their mouths or into the channel where the toothy maws of the tigers await. Only when they get close to the channel do you start to see the barbel moving in the grass. The idea is to anchor a little downstream, cast towards the bank and let your fly swing into the channel like a petrified minnow. Back to our full complement of anglers, including Murray from Natural Selection who used to run a nearby lodge on the panhandle, we set out to decipher the fishing. According to Platon and Murray, it wasn’t firing in the way they knew it could. We were still catching, but not the sort of hand-over- fist results you dream of. There was next to no visibility so, to catch these largely visual predators, it was going to be a case of getting the fly in front of their noses wherever they were holding. That meant getting them down as far as we could into the unseen troughs and holes adjacent to any barbel runs we could find. Worryingly for the locals, who’ve taken a serious knock as Covid hammered tourist numbers, the river was at the lowest it’s been for 36 years. It’s weird to be in a place so remote and wild and to find yourself speculating about the possible impacts of climate change, the future of earth and whether Musk will find anything worth fly fishing for on Mars.
I’m sure other more sensible, leisure-minded people would spend more time on the houseboat, fishing just the early morning and late afternoons and filling the rest of the day with mid-morning and mid-afternoon naps, bush/ birding walks, long lunches and sundowner cruises. Not us. Fully aware of how cold and wet our home town was and how long it had been since we’d used our passports, we were on a mission to maximize the opportunity, spending almost every waking moment looking for the runs. We’d leave early each morning when there was still a surprisingly cold mist on the water, negotiating sandbanks and hippos alike, slowing down to lessen the wake so we didn’t disturb the African Skimmer nests on the banks.
We’d fish through the morning then lunch on an ilala palm island, scoping out the area for crocs, before Bibi dished up a feast. We dunked our shirts in the river and wore them wet for all of five minutes before they dried again. We stayed hydrated with St Louis beer, a super-light Botswanan lager that had almost zero effect and which seemed designed for day-drinking in the sun. While searching for runs in the mid-afternoon, we explored the still side-pools adjacent to the river, marveling at the freshwater jellyfish while trying to catch bream and juvenile tigers on lighter rods. It was hard going, but untethered both literally and metaphorically from the digital shackles of our normal lives, the graft of constant casting and stripping line felt good. The fact that we were doing it in the Okavango, chilling on a houseboat at night and catching tigerfish during the day made it even better. I guess that’s why I want to bring up love. Depending on the habits of your generation and how you feel about “feelings,” the “L” word might make you a little uncomfortable, so let me clarify and categorise it a little. There’s love for your significant other, romantic love if you will. There’s love for your family - your children, your parents, siblings and so on. There’s love for your pets, itself a deep and unique kind of attachment. Then there’s the love you have for your friends. Now, I fish a lot with this crew in and around our homewaters in the Cape. We’ve spent many a long day and night on the water, often blanking, sometimes klapping it, always with great cheer, brotherhood, bonhomie etc. Hell, we even see each other beyond fishing. So, to be out on the water at last, in a completely different place, fishing for a species we normally don’t get to target during a natural phenomenon, was an exceptionally special experience. For me, it was one doused with capital letter Love. Love for the fishing, love for the friends, love for the place and for the opportunity. You can call it “a jol”, “epic”, “amazeballs” or whatever nomenclature works for you, but at its base it’s love. It really did not matter that the fishing was not as off the hook as Platon and Murray said it could be. Because, if the time of Covid has taught us anything, it’s how to appreciate what we’ve got, how lucky we are to be alive and to be able to travel and do cool things like drink beers at 10am and catch tigerfish. Unless you’re already someone who frequently does these things with friends, I want to leave you with a piece of unsolicited advice… Find a place that gives you fly fishing fernweh, like the Okavango did for us and then do something about it. Book a houseboat. Rope in some friends. Plan it. Get the ball rolling a year or two in advance, if necessary, and get everyone to put in the cash. When you eventually get there, you’ll thank yourself for doing it, because this is the stuff proper memories are made of, memories that you’ll dine out on for years to come.
To book the Okavango Spirit or check out Natural Selection’s other lodges, visit naturalselection.travel
OKAVANGO
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RIO POWERFLEX WIRE BITE TIPPET The phrase gamechanger is thrown around a lot these days (tH@NkZz Blane Chocklett), but when it comes to fly fishing for tigerfish this knottable wire tippet from Rio warrants the description. No more swivels and wire straighteners. Simply treat it as you would any other leader material. rioproducts.com, xplorerflyfishing.co.za
