mahseer

[Rhys Perry]

Wonderful
But did you catch?

It does look a stunning, unspoilt country, and the last on earth to receive the television, I believe.
Bet they're ruing that day!

 

[Paul Boote]

Oh yes. And big. But the Northern fish aren't easy......................


Next day PS - omitted to mention last night that when I returned to fish the same area for three weeks some years later, I never had a take: for two weeks the river was unfishable (when it should have been fishable, but wasn't owing to unseasonal rain), with the fish either not present and many miles away or suffering from lockjaw when the water did come right. As I said, the northern fish (and their rivers) aren't easy - I knew some Assam teaplanters once, keen and experienced anglers, who lived by their rivers, and reckoned to catch mahseer consistently only one year in three.

 

[Paul Boote]

Now, I am still blessed with a pretty good memory, so when I saw a name in a BBC news piece just now that I had first seen a good thirty-five years ago in A. St. John Macdonald's classic mahseer book, Circumventing The Mahseer, the name of a man who I seem to remember Macdonald noting as a considerable mahseer fisher in the Assam region, a man who my teaplanter pals also talked of many years later in the late 1970s and early 1980s, something clicked. Quite a fellow, Gyles Mackrell, it appears, a modern-day Hannibal with his troupe of rescuing elephants...


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11652782


PS - more about Mackrell in the Guardian, I see - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/01/elephant-man-gyles-mackrell-invasion-burma

 

[Haydn Clarke]

A shorter version of that story caught my eye in today's Times. The centre for south Asian studies at Cambridge university likens the story to a far eastern Dunkirk. That might be overstating it somewhat but an interesting story nevertheless.

This aspect of history fascinates me and if I could come back in another time, another place and another person, then it would surely be as a colonial settler in either west Africa or in India - however un-pc that might be. Despite the difficulties and danger, of which there was obviously much, I think the colonials had a truely fantastic life, full of adventure and travel in exotic locations.

I have two books that have sat on my "to be read" shelf for some time that I shall get round to reading soon. One - Musings Of An Old Shikari by A.I.R Glasfurd and another that has a small chapter on Mahseer and Trout - Field Sports In India by James Gordon Elliot. I must dig them out and have a read.