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Africa/ Kenya/ North Coast/ Mtwapa 4/24/01

Bad Credit Credit Creditres With the wind blowing steadily from the south-east and heavy rain at times there were few sport fishing boats going out to sea this week, but those that braved the waves had some excellent catches. One was truly exceptional, a monster yellowfin tuna of ninety kilos, which is 198.4 pounds, the second-heaviest yellowfin tuna ever caught in Kenya waters. The boat that secured the fish was Mombasa-based, Inca, captained by Eligio Battaia, and it was out for a four-hour charter, fishing in shallow water near the Shelly Beach reef when the huge fish came to the bait. This fish is of particualar interest to Mtwapa anglers since the Kenya yellowfin tuna record is held by Mtwapa deckie, Katusya Mutunga, with a fish of two hundred and four pounds, caught on thirty pound line on James Adcock's Mtwapa-based Sesse canoe, Samvuke in November 1994. The man on the rod this time, joined in battle with the fish on fifty pound tackle, was Englishman Keith Brand, and it took an hour and twenty minutes to bring the fish to the boat. Right up to the last minute nobody knew what kind of fish it was since it had taken a softhead on the long line and had not shown itself at all. There was speculation that it was a shark or a marlin that hadn't jumped, so after the heavy rod work was done and the fish was beginning to come up all the gaffing tackle was prepared, shark chains, flying gaffs, hand gaffs, everything. Then, from the flying bridge Eligio saw a flash of silver and then the golden gleam of the yellowfin and he knew it was a special fish. Keith was fishing with compatriot John White, and their wives, Joanna and Hillary were on board also to witness this superb catch. Eligio was at The Moorings the following evening and was the toast of the Mtwapa anglers. On the same day Mtwapa fisherman Nigel Spencer also had a hand in an extraordinary event in which a sailfish literally tagged itself. He was fishing in his Sesse canoe, Tengesi with deckie Kazungu, both of them getting soaked in the tropical downpours, when a sailfish came to an outrigger bait, was hooked and peeled off a lot of line on the fifty-pound rig. This fish then jumped again and again, tail thrashing the sea, sail fin flapping, jumping and somersaulting and shaking its bill, about fifteen jumps in all. Then it was brought to the boat, which is totally open and very low to the water, and when Kazunu had the bill in his hand the fish suddenly jumped again, knocking the man aside, and it fell into the boat. The tag pole had been leaning on the seat, tag in place, angled upwards, and the sailfish landed on the pole and literally tagged itself. Fortunately it lay still in the narrow boat and the two men lifted it up, put it back in the sea and revived it. The tag was near its tail and was not deeply embedded so Nigel took it out and re-tagged the fish in the shoulder area and then let it swim away to freedom. This was a good-sized sailfish, estimated at thirty-four kilos. As well as catching this one, Nigel and Kazungu had a busy day on the rods, catching fifteen kawakawa, one skipjack tuna and six dorado of about seven kilos each. They were out fishing on Saturday too, and lost a sailfish as well as catching some dorado. The wind was blowing hard on Sunday and only two boats ventured out, and then not for long. Oona caught nothing, but in the evening Crispin Sassoon set out in his green rigid-hull inflatable, Chongolulu, with his son Calvin and Stephen Webb, and they came back very wet but with two dorado, of about two kilos and five kilos. The waves had been eager to jump into the boat and after one particularly heavy dousing Crispin looked up and noticed that Calvin had vanished. A worrying moment for a father, that, but Calvin was still aboard, just stretched out in a resting position, slopping about with the seawater, seaweed, jellyfish, displaced turtles and manta ray babies in the bilges, having been knocked down by the wave.

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Bad Consolidation Credit Debt Back at The Moorings it was evident that you can take the angler away from the sea but you can't take sea away from the angler, as the pontoons were weighed down by hand-liners and fly-fishermen all trying for the small ones now that the sea was too rough for going out after the big ones. Karl Jennings, with his new-found attachment to fly-fishing, had his first decent catch, two half-kilo lesser trevally, or kole-kole and a five-finger jack Several other anglers tried the fly-rod, a new trend perhaps. Which goes to show that fishing covers a range of methods, but it also covers a range of activity levels from the muscle-wrenching work of slowly lifting and reeling while bringing a ninety kilo yellowfin tuna up from the depths, to being flung aside by a sailfish eager to get into the boat, to the gentler approach of lying stretched out in the sun with a rod in hand. This was the languid pose adopted by a local flight-crew member, Hans, when he was relaxing from his busy life of flying back and forth to Europe, lying out luxuriously on one of the pontoons beside The Moorings restaurant in his skimpy swimming suit, devouring the sunshine. He had two fishing rods with him, one in each hand, and now and then he had to raise his activity level to the feverish pitch of moving his right arm slightly to lay down one rod and pick up the ice-frosted glass beside him in order to refresh himself after his exertions. The only complication in Hans's supine and soporific sun-filled world was the occasional appearance of an attentive barman who had to be mollified with fresh orders for drinks. One would not therefore have envisaged Hans at that time as someone singled out by Fate to be suddenly struck by the need for lightning-quick responses and swift action. But Fate, as we all know, lurks behind the frostiest glass and in the sunniest patch of light, waiting to jerk us about like puppets on a string let down from the sky. Just as Hans was raising his freshly filled glass to his lips, with the ice tinkling invitingly, the rod he had laid down beside him suddenly came to life, shot forward to the edge of the pontoon, flew through the air, and like an arrow from the bow of an Amazonian fish-hunter it pierced the water at an angled trajectory and sped on to an unseen destination beneath the waters of the creek, never to be seen again. Hans had moved, of course, as any one of us seeing our favourite rod vanishing forever would move, but he did not move fast enough and the torpid state of brain and muscle in temporary hibernation left him floundering on the pontoon in impotent amazement. It must have been a fish that pulled the rod over, a big one, and it was one that got away with everything, leaving the fisherman out for the count. Which is how most fishermen and fisherwomen in Mtwapa feel at the moment since the wind seems set to blow hard for the next few months and it looks as though there won't be much fishing for a while.

Part of the Globetrotter Travel Series, this work is suitable for the needs of tourists who are new Kenya. In addition to the main map of Kenya, it includes Town Plans of Mombasa, Mombasa Old Town, Nairobi; and covers areas of Lamu and Manda Islands, North Coast, South Coast, various National Parks and Nature Reserves. 2007

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