Fly Fishing for the Elusive Nile Perch

By: GREG GHAUI Photography by: STUART HARLEY

One pre-season evening, I walked downstream out of our half-built camp along the riverbed. A few days back, Stu and I had come with 9-weights to prospect for tigerfish, and had been pleasantly surprised as we rotated positions fishing our way along a fiery looking cut that you could only ever dream of holding fish, our increasingly sparse fly patterns attracting plenty of action along the way.

Near the bottom of the run, as we debated following the channel where it crossed to the other side, we had seen a couple of rows of elephant tracks, and this is what has loosely drawn me back here. There is no shortage of tracks anywhere within the riverbed arena, but there have been big elephant shaped gaps in many of the classical river vistas we have been in, and I keep waiting for my eyes to snag on a swinging trunk in the distance.

This place just has pachyderms written all over it, so when the huge round sinkholes trailing up out of the water and along the beach for once don’t take on the form of hippo pugs, then it feels like we’re finally on the brink of completing a puzzle. To come here again hoping to see them is a long shot, more of an excuse to get out of camp but at least it provides a motive and some direction. Besides, if elephants don’t make an appearance, there is a very good chance something else will, and even better odds on it being completely worthwhile anyway.

Sitting chest deep in a diminutive mid-channel with a small clear pool in its wake, I notice that I’ve cropped up on quite a few radars already. Three separate monkey species seem to have similar agendas to me this evening, and Guereza Colobus, Tantalus monkeys and Olive baboons are raising varying levels of curiosity and caution from the trees above, banks and the beach opposite me respectively. Between them, on the river’s edge, is a bushbuck ewe lying folded but with her head upright and alert. I’m not exactly sure why, but I decide then that I will only leave when she does, and it is immediately reassuring to be on her watch.

Respite from immediate responsibility, heat, flies and dust allows me a sudden break from the present too, and in my mind I slow pan up and away from my rock pool until I can get some wide angle perspective on how I find myself in this rather fortunate position facing the startling Atlanticus Mountains near the Cameroon/Nigeria border.

We spent the whole of last week fishing and exploring a section of the Faro River and trying to get a handle on its vital signs, and what they could tell us about catching the huge nile perch here. We took an incredible amount on board in a very short time, mostly because we had to, it was all there happening, and we just plugged ourselves right into the middle of it. Fishing the pre-dawn chill and deep into the night, plus everything in between, we raced through the bases quickly and are strangely familiar with the river in no time, and all that tells us is just how much there is still to know.

Ed caught a truly massive fish one night in ludicrous circumstances, and it gave us all a glimpse of what we came here hoping for, and what was really possible. Just what that fish stands for in the bigger picture of the future of this river basin is a whole other issue that it is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. For it to have happened at all, and to have been there to experience it first hand was one thing, but if that fish could represent a chance through fly fishing to pull back a few punches for an area that is on its knees fighting for survival without even knowing it, how special would that be?

The bushbuck is suddenly nearly back at the bank thicket, and already quite hard to see in the fading light. The content cercopithecoids are also gravitating towards the tall timber, and in my mind’s eye I can still see the giant released fish paddling out of our torchlight and back into whatever world it came from. Just in these three events, the Faro has briefly looked me in the eye, acknowledged me and turned back to once again steadfastly face the oncoming era, and whatever it brings, with or without me.

Since that early season evening, we logged many more hours of intimacy with the Faro, and although Elephants did make some appearances, the perch (and plenty of other fish) made many more memorable features. While going about our simple and single-minded business of trying to catch fish on flies for fun, we were completely taken in by this special river and valley that keeps it.

The river, the rocks and the heat are your closest companions here and each deserve a special mention for their outstanding qualities in their respective fields. The Faro itself is a ragged, raw, clean gash of different shades of blue and green, shallow and light over the sand like a graze or deep and dark where it punctures into the gorges. The rocks are a range of rampant scabs and keloid scars of python-patterned Gneiss clinging to the channel. Others that look like the massive high water swell and chop has been galvanized, forged and left in place while the channel recedes.

Sometimes it feels like they are the most alive and thriving entity, and that it’s their metabolism that makes them too hot to touch in the hostile high sun hours. The heat too has a geological quality to it, like it is laid down consistently every day in thin sedimentary layers, compressing out any moisture and accumulating a full igneous density that actually hums around your ears and cures wrist thick Lord Derby Eland steaks into prime biltong (jerky) in less than 60 hours.

We clocked 42 degrees Celsius in the shade while having lunch on the final day of the season, and if you consider your supporting casts include the fastest tsetse flies on the planet, an insatiable thirst, and the Harmattan (a prevailing dust cloud of varying intensity), you have to find something to cling to - to remind yourself why you are here. Luckily, like everything else here attached to the river, you never have to look far.

A SPECIES OASIS The Faro is a type specimen oasis, fringed with fresh foliage and deep shade, and sheltering a staggering sub-surface biomass.

The sparkling clear water lays a lot of it startlingly bare (wading is like herding clouds of baitfish that billow out with each step), but there is still so much mystery that it seems like the visibility is only a small concession for the fly fisher’s benefit.

There is an unbelievable amount on offer to the itchy angler who is willing to meet it and fish it on its terms. This river has exactly what you want, and only it really seems to know what that is. All it asks is some curiosity and persistence, which combined with a bit of strategy and adaptation can wreak all kinds of carnage. If seeing is believing, then ignorance is sometimes bliss - I wouldn’t have believed most of what did happen without having front row seats to it.

There is a wild and loose energy that dares anything to go down, and fly fishing is the perfect catalysts it seems. The chronicle of Ed’s exploratory fish, or how we came to be in possession of an entire pelt of the best natural, but illegally traded, tying material might be the best examples to try to sum this up, but they would fill whole articles of their own.

There is just not much that is conventional about any of it, too many contrasts that keep it from being classified.

Wading Patagonia style freestone channels and sight fishing, for three species of Tigerfish. Bouncing between tippets from 5X to 80lb in a session. Nymphing braided runs lottery style for fish species never caught on fly before. Throwing huge flies for big nile perch, but then retrieving them cautiously and stealthily, gently trying to coax an eat out of something that could fit your head in its mouth. In the dark. With 50 hippos letting off steam somewhere in front of you.

Everything you love about fly fishing are the only things you will recognise about it here, because there is just no template for fishing like this. Catching fish this big, in water this small, at night, on foot, in big game country. With this many moving parts, the permutations for what is possible are limitless. Nowhere else can match this for sheer accessibility to nile perch on fly, and it is an astounding fishery without even considering

them. Lines, flies, leaders, approaches, retrieves, it’s all open for experimentation, adaptation and invention with glorious rewards at stake. The Tigers are absolutely electric and borderline impossible to handle on a rod. The barbs are subtle, spooky and abundant. The perch are just an enigma. These and everything else are the open book of entertainment that face you every day on the Faro.

My early season quest for elephants, and the season-long pursuit of perch distil down the equation to its simplest formula. In many ways they are the Faro, the two mega faunas dominating the spheres of land and water that define the valley. They sit balancing atop the rock solid foundation of ecology that is needed to support healthy populations of anything this big, starting with the multitudes of earthworms whose activity and casts have bizarrely shaped almost every square meter of undisturbed terrain, performing services that have allowed every subsequent level in the ecological hierarchy to thrive.

The equilibrium and level of complexity that has been attained here is in stark contrast to what is happening in Cameroon, and much of Africa and the developing world. Returning to the riverside after spending a few days in Garoua buying camp building equipment hammered home how this ecosystem is by far the most complete, pristine, and functional entity that we encountered in a place now defined by chaos, inefficiency and gross imbalance.

It deserves to be protected solely as an example and reminder that peace and stability, balance and complexity are not foreign concepts but are in fact a part of the local heritage, and not a remote destination at the end of the long road we seem to be hurtling down.

The elephants are hanging in by a thread, but at least there is a space still there for them, and while the perch are very much present in awesome force, they are tied to the same precarious fate as they only can be. To ask either of them to take an interest in our squabble to protect or condemn them would be well below their standings.

The Faro is in the elite bracket of wilderness that still exists as it does because it always has, entirely removed from our influences until now. It is going to have to be us who will have to manoeuvre, to decide which way its fortunes will fall.

By picking up our fly rods, we are throwing ourselves into the fray together, and in doing so, buying time and creating awareness in the hope that they bring with it the lifeline needed to protect this amazing area.

It seems that in uncovering the first truly great nile perch fly fishery, we are just in time to try and save the last one. What an incredible opportunity, and what a journey it will be!

For more information:www.tourettefishing.com