In “The Angler in India or The Mighty Mahseer” by “Skene Dhu” (1923) there is a communication from a Captain L. Fortescue dated 1922 about fishing the river Ravi. He mentions that it is much overlooked by anglers despite there being some reasonable fishing and gives excellent descriptions of pools and junctions, bags therein, time of day to fish and seasons, camping grounds, what game was available to supplement rations, routes to the pools etc. In short a thoroughly useful missive.
The Ravi is the smallest of the five rivers that make up the Punjab (Punj=five, Ab=water or river). The others are the Beas, the Chenab, the Jhelum, and the Sutlej. Things have changed since Fortescue’s day and the river has been dammed for hydroelectric power. The resulting lake, the Ranjeet Sagar, is some forty kilometres long and has long since drowned the pools and junctions under hundreds of feet of water.
But mahseer abound and a call from our guides and friends from the Trout Water Lodge in Kashmir advising a visit saw my schoolmate, Thakur Ghanshyam Singh of Kharwa, and myself tootling up the highway ( and I mean tootling, the klaxon was much in use) from Delhi to Pathankot. At Pathankot we turned into the hills and twisted and climbed our way to Dhari and the perhaps aptly named Hunky Dory Resort. There we met our guides and two other friends from Bangladesh.
The guides had been fishing and were full of tales of innumerable fish in the 1 to 4kg range in a bay they had named Area 51! On enquiry about secrets from the aliens they produced their magic weapon. It looked awfully like a Mepps No.3 spinner to me!
Armed with spinners and in my case my heavy rod, for there were rumours of leviathans, we set sail in large, stable, flat bottomed boats from under the bridge which spans the lake at Basholi.
The bridge at Basholi. Fortescue described the views obtainable as “rather jolly”! The eternal snows of the high Himalayas can be seen peeking out from behind the foothills.
Area 51 lived up to its promise and we caught innumerable fish in the 1 to 3kg range.
Small mahseer on a Mepps spinner.
The method was trolling with occasional periods of casting towards the shore while letting the boat drift on a dead engine.
Ghanshyam with a nice fish from Area 51. I am holding his rod. Umar is holding the fish.
I caught my first fish with my rod in a holder and only knew I had one when the boatman yelled out that a fish was on. I reeled it in alright but it was egg without salt. I held my rod thereafter and the sudden tug of a fish as it hit the lure, and the anticipation of a hit made the experience more palatable.
It was Umar who stole the show on the first day. We fished with spinners but he fished with a two inch deep diver called a Hot N Tot Madflash in “shad” colours with a red flash on the belly. He outfished us 5 to 1 although nothing big. So the 2nd day saw us fishing similar lures. Again a lot of fish but nothing big. Until the evening that is. On a last sweep around Area 51 our host, Doc. Faisal, put on a larger 4 inch lure which dove a lot deeper. The result was a 7 kg fish that fought like a tiger.
I am no trolling expert having done my mahseer fishing along running Himalayan streams casting from the bank. It was only on the third day, having changed my heavy rod for a light trout spinning rod and a Shimano spinning reel in the 3000 size more suited to the size of fish we were catching that I had one of those absolutely Archimedean “eureka” moments. That too by sheer accident or courtesy of a fish.
To my eye, two days of brilliant sunshine and warmer than usual weather seemed to have triggered the beginnings of an algal bloom on the lake. The crystal waters seemed a little tainted with green on the third day. Adding Faisal’s bigger fish on a bigger lure to my thought process I decided I needed a big lure, with deeper diving characteristics, in very bright colours, to contact the larger fish which were apparently lying below the schoolies at approximately 15 to 20 feet of water.
A search through the lure boxes produced just one likely lure. Called the Samba 400F, it had a bright chartreuse, fat and deep body, slightly darker head and a bold red flash on the belly and was some 4 inches in body length. It was a floating deep diver. I had bought it in Singapore around the turn of the century and never used it. A test showed it diving straight down, holding depth until vertically below the rod tip, and even through the slight tinge of colour in the water, glowing like a green candle at a depth of 15 feet.
Whether it was the logic or just fortuitous chance, it worked. Umar had just hooked a small mahseer at the mouth of the bay (Area 51) and I was trying to reel in my line to avoid tangling his. The light rod and deep diving lure meant I had to pump it in even though the boat was just drifting. The result was a sink and draw motion as the lure floated up at the end of every pump. A hard strike saw a fish strip 50 yards of line from the reel. A savage fight of 15 minutes saw a 6 kg mahseer in the net. Finally a lightbulb went off in this pea brain. I had been trolling inertly, holding the rod still and letting the lure wiggle steadily along. It now occurred to me that I could impart a lot of action to the lure using my rod, and yes, I am dumb. My only excuse is that I have not trolled before!
Once the light bulb went on the lure caught fish after fish, all above the average. Towards the end of the day a savage take saw my rod bow over and then straighten. An inspection showed the forward treble had been wrenched off. Mahseer destroy lures.
It was too late to bother about putting on another treble and I lazily continued fishing with just the tail treble. Ghanshyam hooked a small mahseer and once again while pumping in my lure I had a massive strike, which with great good fortune saw the fish hooked on the tail treble. The usual screaming runs saw a 7 kg fish in the boat.
There was much heart burning in camp that night. I had the lure that caught the big ones and there was only the one!
Ghanshyam and I were done with fishing Area 51. On the last day we told the boatman to point his prow northwards and we steamed off as hard as his tired old engine would go. Fortescue mentions a junction between the Chiril stream and the Ravi river and an hour and half of hard going saw us there. Enroute, we sipped tea and absorbed the magnificent views. Here the hills were higher, the stretches of jungle thicker and deeper, and the eroded faces of half submerged hills added many twisting shapes to please the eye.
Fortescue records two good fish caught at this junction despite the junction itself being a rapid on the Ravi. The rapid is now well submerged but we reckoned that the structure would make good holding places for large fish as would the undercuts in the half drowned cliffs along the banks.
The Doctor caught the first fish of about 3 kg. Not large, but it showed there were fish to be had here.
The boatman, an old hand at the game, swung the boat towards a cliff rearing out of the water, forcing my lure to swing out past the line of the boat to search the undercut that was surely there. By some instinct I began to pump the lure at the same time. Just as I commenced my third pump the rod went over like it had been sandbagged and, with the boat going one way and the fish the other, line absolutely smoked off the reel. The boatman killed the engine with alacrity and the unwieldy boat lost way immediately but the fish did not. I watched as the level of line sank so rapidly on the reel that I feared I would be spooled. A good 140 meters of line had gone when the fish finally slowed and held station. I could not move him or gain an inch. Were it not for the occasional savage jerk of his head I would have sworn I had hooked the bottom.
The fish suddenly decided he would head for the cliff. No doubt he knew every inch of its submerged surface and knew the hole he wanted to bolt into. Fortunately he did this at an angle towards the boat allowing me to retrieve line. I bent the rod into its maximum battle curve, clamped a hand on the spool, despite the reel already being near its maximum drag and held on for dear life. An eight and a half foot light trout spinning rod is hardly the weapon to slow a large mahseer hell bent on going somewhere and I was certain the fish would make the undercut and my line would be cut on the overhang. But the fish slowed, stopped, surged again, turned and headed into open water much to the relief of all.
Ten minutes I had already fought him on maximum drag but he wrenched another hundred metres of line out before he stopped. He let me bring him in towards the boat this time and we hoped his strength was petering out. If so there was any amount of peter left to run. Twenty yards from the boat he turned and surged off on another screaming run. The reel howled, the rod stayed fixed in its curve and we stared in wonder at the rooster tail where the line snaked away into the depths.
We had not set eyes on him yet for he stayed deep. Twenty minutes and three or four more searing runs later, he surfaced some eighty metres out. The line running from the rod tip to the fish confirmed it as the fish we had hooked, but not a sound left our lips as we stared at the long dark shape that lay on the surface of the water.
Another thirty minutes and many lunges and runs later he finally lay alongside the boat and we lifted him in.
Golden Mahseer (Tor putitora) 17 kgs. (37.47 lbs). The promised pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They grow much bigger.
The weight of the fish is not important. Its beauty will remain. But it is the magnificent views, the wonderful companionship, the delicious coolth of the evening after the days bright sun, the splash of whisky in a tin cup as you head home while the hills are coloured by the setting sun that will forever be remembered.
All The best
Lakhyaman
P.S. Apologies for taking up so much space but I had no other tale to tell.
