THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Fishing a similar gravel bar and pool on another occasion,
we dropped onto a shoal of pacu, which are large fruit
eating piranhas not averse to taking fish baits. Great fish to
catch, and excellent fish to eat too as it would later turn out.
Very powerful never say die fighters all going on up into
double figures.
My wife Dawn had the best one at fourteen pounds fishing
from the bank with Marcel, as she wasn't too keen on the
ferocity of the water flow. It was hard to stand up and
dangerous to wade in places, becoming even more
dangerous than that at one stage, though not because of the
water flow this time.
Instead, it was for what came up on the end of my line. I'd
felt a bit of activity down at the business end for a few
minutes, but nothing you could really put down as a bite.
So fearing that my bait might be stripped, I decided to wind
in, and immediately started to sense 'something' on the end
of the line. No recognisable struggling, so it didn't feel like
a fish. Then it surfaced maybe twenty yards out. A sort of
long yellow and green shape.
Marcel with a Payara
On seeing it, the native Indian guides were off like a shot.
They thought it was an anaconda, but actually it was even
worse than that. It was an electric eel, and there we were stood shin deep in the water directly in front
of it.
Fortunately, it must have discharged itself out in the deeper water when it first felt the hook, because it
just laid there nice and still at my feet waiting for something to happen. I have to say, not the easiest bit
of disgorging I've ever done, and not the only electric eel of the trip either.
Other fish caught included a variety of catfish, stingrays, and red bellied piranhas from a pool on a small
stream way out in the jungle which one of the local Indians had taken us to. And eventually, during the
last hour of the last morning, I landed a seventeen pound payara.
SOUTH AFRICA
Of all the place’s I have visited, either to fish or simply for a holiday, on my list of preferences, South
Africa is the only one I would never ever go back to. You couldn't pay me enough to revisit the place.
A very uncomfortable country with lots of highly opinionated bigoted people, and the sense of a need
to be looking over your shoulder constantly.
I suppose that being held up at gun point in the middle of the day at the side of the main road in Cape
Town didn't exactly help. Had it not been for a couple in a passing car, plus a local security team picking
the incident up on CCTV, I don't know what might have happened.
That occurred within hours of us arriving in Cape Town. But I was already uneasy about the situation
before I even got there, having just spent a week fishing in and around Sodwana Bay in KwaZulu-Natal
where we were based inside a large protected compound close to the beach, which kind-of says it all.
The only time we went out was when we were escorted, and even then we were stopped by army patrols
looking for hijacked cars. It might have felt worth the discomfort if the fishing had been better. As
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