Our flight to us over some ice flows near Antarctica, and I snapped a few shots from the plane.
We arrived in Johannesberg and after a bite and a few beers hit the sack, excited about seeing the Zambezi the next day. We took and early morning flight to Zambia and then boarded a very small Cessna to take us into the lower Zambezi. A shot of the terrain view from the plane.
Our first sighting of the Zambezi.
Upon landing, we hopped into a four wheel drive with an open canopy and headed off through the bush, you couldn't keep the smile off our faces as we encountered our first elephant smashing through the brush. Our trip finished off with a 30 minute cruise down the river to camp. The river itself is massive, for those that have seen the Mississippi or even the Mekong Delta it has that kind of scale. The river forms the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, at that time of year your heading into the real hot months and she looked pretty dry already, interspersed with acacia trees. You could easily be somewhere in the malee country. That night after a few G&Ts at the bar we spoke fishing with a number of other guests and of course Tiger tactics, the excitment was intense I was absolutley busting to get on the water and swim some of the many lutes id brought over.
First day up at 5.30 and after a quick breakfast Mark and I were on the boat and off down the river with our guide, Issaacc. In terms of gear we both were using a 5pc Nitro 6kg (we were both too scared of being separated from our rods so we bought the 5pc for the trip and packed it in our suitcases). We both had two spools one with 20ib braid and the other 30ibs and we had a range of different sized leaders from 15-40 ibs. We were advised the average Tiger was around the 5 pound mark with an very good fish at 10ib and an absolute trophy at 15ibs. Our guid pulled up to our first fishing spot and pointed to a bank on our right, we would drift down stream casting our lures into the structure - logs, overhangs, eddies, etc... Well this was fishing we both understood having done a lot of native fishing in our lives.
My first lure chosen was a rapala x-rap, white with a rooster head. First cast was a beauty just half a meter off the bank and right into a nice eddy, two cranks of the reel and BANG. oh your joking, I'm on... And "on" is a pretty special experience when your talking about a Tiger Fish, he absolutley smashed the lure and within 2 seconds was cartwheeling across the top of the water, the power was incredible. He spat the lure and my heart dropped. Well thats not a bad start, I asked Issaacc how big he thought the fish was "about 5ibs" he replied. We spent the next few hours drifting the banks and casting at structure with our guide always keeping us off the bank at our most precise casting distance. We got a number of hits but just couldn't hook up. I had done a lot of research on this, apparently Tigers especially the smaller ones b/w 1-5ibs have a catch to hit rate of 10-1. They have incredibly tough mouths and will spit the hook more likely than not.
We continued to get hits and I lost another beauty, about 10ibs says Issaacc and by the time we were getting into afternoon territory I started to have that horrible feeling "could we come all this way and doughnut?". We tried lots of different lures and finally I got one on the boat, now he wasn't going to win any records but it was a tiger fish none the less, there were high fives and the monkey was off our backs.
In the afternoon we went back to focusing on the heavily structured banks and our luck change. I'd swapped lures to a lighter and shallower diving Yo-Zuri rooster head and the fish responded. It would prove to be the lure of the trip and one that had to be shared by both of us. Over the next few hours we pulled some lovely fish.
I had dominated the day and ended up with our biggest fish at 7.5ibs. However after lending Mark the famouse Yo-Zuri the next day he "put on a concert " and landed fish at 6, 7, and 9 pounds. We were landing more and more fish once we found the big ones, they tend to go deep and not jump as much and spit the lure.
Over the next few days of fishing we caught about 25 fish with the biggest going 11.5 Ibs (we both got one the same size so no could claim victory).
And a few Vundu, the biggest going 25 ibs
