People have often asked me

"How do you / did you catch the fish you catch / have caught, Paul?".

I long ago found that a simple graphic saved me a lot of time, breath and braincells.

http://www.moldychum.com/storage/200.gif?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1385784807014

Get yer hair cut

An Indian sadhu about to start mahseer fishing on the River Ganges. Learned the trick from me, plus the hair is power thing, you know.

http://dashama.tv/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/IMG_1323.jpg


PS - I have realised in the minute since posting that random Googled-up pic that I have fished that very spot. I am 90-odd per-cent certain that it is a place called Phool Chatti, a few miles upstream from Rishikesh. Probably experience trouble if fishing it now though, with the Hindu super-religious a lot more militant these days.


Later PPS - Oh Shiva! Phool Chatti, once a remote, tiny, local religious retreat at a Ganges river confluence, is now an international yoga centre with its own website - http://www.phoolchattiyoga.com/

Hmm.

I have found the answer simple go to the best venues and get advice from the top people in the game . the rest is time and the money to do it and never delay in doing it next year may be to late.

Don't know about that, tinker, but I quite accidentally stumbled across some stuff in my life 35 years ago yesterday. Take a look at the picture of the sadhu holy man beside the Ganges above, then imagine flinging a 3- to 4.5-inch shallow-running floating plug (sometimes a deep diver, sometimes a small, very heavy, copper spoon of my own hacksaw-file-hammer manufacture) as far as you can out into that racing water beyond him, then occasionally having the rod nearly taken from your hands by a taking mahseer and watch and hear your reel lose 40 to 100 yards of line in seconds as the fish sets off for the Bay of Bengal.

Need to do a bit of yoga now to recover from the memory.

Paul Boote said:

Don't know about that, tinker, but I quite accidentally stumbled across some stuff in my life 35 years ago yesterday. Take a look at the picture of the sadhu holy man beside the Ganges above, then imagine flinging a 3- to 4.5-inch shallow-running floating plug (sometimes a deep diver, sometimes a small, very heavy, copper spoon of my own hacksaw-file-hammer manufacture) as far as you can out into that racing water beyond him, then occasionally having the rod nearly taken from your hands by a taking mahseer and watch and hear your reel lose 40 to 100 yards of line in seconds as the fish sets off for the Bay of Bengal.

Need to do a bit of yoga now to recover from the memory.

Click to expand...

Surely you were on the right venue at the right time you can only catch what is in the water you are fishing.

tiinker said:

Surely you were on the right venue at the right time you can only catch what is in the water you are fishing.

Click to expand...

Plus, when it comes to North Indian mahseer, tinker, a large slice of Golden Balls luck, for with these fish, right time, right place, right gear and lures simply aren't enough - they might be present but just not "eating", or absent from the piece of water concerned, having just "gone", yet to arrive in it, or be just missing from many miles of river whereabouts unknown. Not easy fish, as many of the guys who fished for the more dependable, amenable and stay at home, South Indian mahseer species, then went North expecting to repeat their success have discovered over the past twenty or so years, in spite of my personally gently warning a number of them when they had contacted me for advice before they left: "My advice to you is to think as I have long done when going off to fish north India - expect to blank horribly, with any fish, however few and non-Mighty, that confound that expectation and throw themselves at your lures turning the trip into a near-miracle triumph.". Thought me a hard-bitten Gloomster trying to put them off or down, they did. They learned!


PS - I was telephoned yesterday evening (Monday) by one of those guys, a man I haven't seen or heard from since the very late 1990s, one of the better sorts among the new, ambitious mahseer men, saying "Hi, Paul ... yaketty yak, ya da ya da ... did you see Burma on the television the other night? ... forests and wildlife still in tact ... must be mahseer in the more remote rivers....".

I was as always positive but realistic - "Sure to be, but the northern and western tribal people make Indian commercial fishers look rank amateurs, having well-contructed and perfectly located, fixed seasonal fish traps in addition to the usual nets etc. Bear in mind also that the old Burma Hand I knew in the early 1980s, a man who had retired to Cheltenham after thirty years in pre-Independence Burma (timber then oil), a very keen mahseer fisher, told me that he would sometimes catch well at the tail-end of the monsoon but that this would involve being badly "leached up" in the rank forests and on the heavily grown banks, or not all. And that the blue-skies, dry-season springs could be good, every other year or so. Or not. I reckon that Burma could just be a remake of that North India movie classic, Mahseer Nightmare!"

My caller saw the funny side. Others, over the past twenty-odd years, have not, blaming me for their non-catching. Takes all sorts.