African Fly-Fishing safari

This book is featured on the Exclusive Books' 2003 Publishers' Choice list.

‘African Fly-Fishing Safari’ will be most appreciated by anglers who find travelling to interesting fishing destinations as thrilling as the catch itself because above all else, the book is a smorgasbord of beautiful fly-fishing pictures and travel anecdotes that will inspire an insatiable wanderlust.

Inspiring wanderlust is exactly what authors, husband-and-wife team Karl and Lesley Lane, set out to do and so the book is largely devoid of fly-fishing technical know-how and isn’t a travel guide either. With pictures that are testament to the very best fishing the African continent has on offer and anecdotes from their various trips, Lesley and Karl are hoping that by sharing their experiences they’ll not only infect you with the travel bug, they’ll also show that travelling with rod and reel to places which “from your armchair seem remote” is not as difficult as it seems.

For me, the book is somewhat of a journey down memory lane as I’ve been lucky enough to sample some of the delights of fishing on the African continent – from throwing a tantalizing mayfly out for hungry trout on an icy cold winter’s morning in Mpumalanga to just recently cracking open beers under a blazing Zambezi sun while tiger fishing in Zimbabwe. With the call of the African Fish Eagle still ringing in my ears and blood red sunsets indelibly imprinted into my memory bank, I greedily lapped up the beautiful pictures of a landscape I’d recently sampled.

But there is so much more to inspire… the surf and lagoon fishing in Mozambique, cruising the Okovango Delta in Botswana, the rugged coast of Namibia, the crystal clear streams of the Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal to the estuaries of St Lucia, fishing for skippies on rivers in the Eastern Cape and snoek off the Western Cape coast to trout fishing in the shallow mountain streams that run through the Cape’s sandstone mountains.

And if the pictures alone of these varied and beautiful landscapes aren’t enough to get you salivating then take some time with the anecdotes. They read like fishing tales told around the fire or at an evening meal when good company, good food and spicy bottle of wine allow for the colourful rendition of fishing adventures.

For instance, Karl’s tale of fishing for shoals (yes, that’s right shoals) of tigers in the Okavango Delta or, as he refers to it, “heaven – without the inconvenience of having to die first” had me drooling at the thought. I nearly packed my bags there and then.

Despite it’s non-technical nature, there is no shortage of useful fishing advice to be found. It’s the kind of advice you’d expect to pick up in the sharing of fishing stories and as such it carries the tried and tested stamp of authenticity.

And then there’s all sorts of other useful travel information — roads to avoid unless you have the patience of Mother Theresa and what times to visit Mozambique if you don’t want to sit through a cyclone. All of these tips are woven into a tapestry of travel tales that make for thoroughly enjoyable reading.

I loved stumbling across the recipe for roe, a recommended aperitif to be enjoyed with ice-cold Vodka while reading about fishing for mullet in the St Lucia lagoon and I grinned ear-to-ear on reading how a burning mosquito coil set alight a box of fly lines and reels but was fortunately doused with a bottle of cabernet before Karl burnt his tent to the ground.

So if you do little more than dream of fly-fishing adventures (of the ilk of wading into the surf with the coarse sand under your toes as you fight your bonefish to the beach in Mozambique) then African Fly-Fishing safari will have you booking a trip in no time. At the very least it will be fantastic fuel for your fly-fishing fantasies.