THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

GAMBIA
I've fished Gambia on a number of occasions. In fact, on my last visit I even got married there with the
taxi driver on the video camera and two of the church cleaners as witnesses. And speaking of witnessing
things, because my visits always had a few years of a gap between them, I have been able to witness at
first hand how the fishing has progressively declined in quality.
Denton Creek Fishing Centre
You get to hear all sorts of rumours as to why this is, such as the
selling off commercial fishing rights to certain Asian interests.
I don't know where the truth lies. What I do know is that it happened very quickly, going from superb
to poor over a very short period, which is bad for visiting anglers; bad for the tourism economy, and
most of all, bad for the locals, many of whom lead subsistence lives reliant on what they can catch from
their dug out canoes as the main source of food and income for themselves and their families, and it is
those people down at the pointed end who always seem to come out of things worst off.
The inspiration for my first visit was a photograph of a friend of mine Graeme Pullen, sat on the rear
seat of a nineteen foot orkney fastliner holding the tails of two three hundred pound plus lemon sharks,
which seemed to stretch forever towards the camera along the floor of the boat.
Based on that, in 1990 four of us went over for a mix of small boat and charter boat fishing out of Oyster
Creek which separates Banjul Island from the rest of the country.
Big sharks had been our primary target, of which we hooked several. We had some enormous lemon
sharks on the trace at the side of the boat, plus at least one huge black tip. But, through a catalogue of
errors, not a single proper shark either boated or deliberately released, all of which must go down to the
man in charge.
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