I suppose I’m as guilty as any angling writer of giving the impression that my fishing trips are a more or less constant procession of successful exploits with reel singing action and happy, smiley trophy shots. After all, who wants to read about the blanks? The reality, of course, is that for every great day on the water there’s disaster and every good day is balanced by a pleasant, but distinctly average, angling experience. So this time I thought I’d tell a couple of tales of long planned trips to exotic locations that didn’t quite go as planned.

Regular readers of this blog will know that in addition to targeting the tench, chub, perch and roach in my local waters, interspersed by occasional barbel trips to the Trent and Wye, my other great angling passion is traveling to far off places in search of those bucket list species that were once just the stuff of boyhood dreams. The older I become the more important it seems to get these adventures done and dusted while I’m fit and healthy enough to handle the rigours of long haul flights, tropical heat and jungle camping.

I’m lucky enough to have caught most of my target fish but there’s one that keeps calling me back, the golden mahseer of the Indian sub-continent, and another, the Pacific Ocean roosterfish, whose acquaintance I had yet to make.

Destination angler and fishing guide Dave Lewis with one of those lovely Costa Rica roosterfish that we failed to catch this year!

Costa Rican Capers

Possibly the best known destination angler in the U.K. is Dave Lewis, author of three great books chronicling his trips to far off places and a fishing guide for Angler’s World Holidays and now Spoilt for Choice Travel. I first fished with Dave in Belize a few years ago and we hit it off straightaway. He earned his reputation as a sea angler but is a consummate all rounder who is equally at home casting flies for Spring salmon on his local river Usk in Wales or accompanying me on winter trips to the upper Kennet in search of dace and grayling on the stick float.

Dave is fountain of knowledge on fishing almost anywhere on the planet but has a particular love for Costa Rica. His stories of battles with roosterfish, marlin, tuna and mahi mahi off the Pacific coast of this small Central American country had me reaching for the diary and booking up a trip with him to Samara. This is a charming little place on the Nicoya Peninsula favoured by backpackers, a few American exiles and the more adventurous European tourists but mercifully free of super yachts and billionaires. If only the fishing had turned out to be as good as the nightlife!

Samara is renowned for both its inshore fishing for jacks and roosters and offshore for the bigger pelagic species. We were a mixed group with different priorities. Andy favoured trolling out wide for the marlin and tuna while Stuart and myself were keener on casting the reefs and shoreline with poppers and stickbaits. In the end we agreed to split our days equally but I should have realised something was up when our skipper, Nan, kept encouraging us to go wide.

These normally wonderful fishing grounds produced just a handful of fish over three days of hard casting

The coastline of Costa Rica is spectacular and the beaches largely deserted where we were. A 20 minute boat ride either north or south from Samara would see us casting behind the breaking waves or onto rocky headlands that just screamed fish. And usually that was the case. The year before Dave had landed 18 jacks in a morning by himself and his party had caught plenty of roosters before spending time out wide on the marlin and tuna. However, for whatever reason, be it weather or currents, the bait fish had gone missing on the inshore grounds and the normally prolific jacks and roosters were virtually absent. Three days hard casting saw me land the grand total of two jacks while Stuart had one small rooster. This was not what we had come for.

Beautiful coastline, abundant wildlife and dramatic ocean sunsets made up for the lack of action inshore whilst the ever reliable mahi mahi kept us entertained offshore

For sure we caught fish trolling out wide and as much as I love catching leaping mahi mahi on spin gear they are not a whole lot of sport on 30kgs outfits designed to handle big marlin and tuna. We found a few large pods of dolphins around which the tuna like to gather but they were behaving strangely and didn’t appear to be feeding on anything we could offer.

As ever, I enjoyed visiting a new country even if the fishing failed to live up to expectations. Roosterfish remain on my bucket list and I’m sure I’ll be heading back to somewhere in Central American before too long.

The fish that lit the flame – a 76lbs golden mahseer from famous River Cauvery in 1996

Mahseer Madness of a different kind

It was 1996 when the flame was lit and the passion for adventure fishing became an obsession. The fish responsible for this expensive madness was a 76lbs golden mahseer hooked in the foaming torrent of Kengul Rapids on the mighty River Cauvery in Southern India. It was the best of all times to be fishing for the hardest fighting freshwater fish on the planet. We were reaping the rewards of the pioneers who had come before. Paul Boote and the Trans World expedition had done the hard yards and opened the eyes of travelling anglers to the potential of this amazing river and a fish that had been pretty much left alone by sport fisherman since the days of the British Raj. There then followed other well known anglers like John Wilson, Jeremy Wade and John Bailey who wrote enticingly about their triumphs and disasters in trying to tame the ‘tiger of the river’. And then there was Dave Plummer, the tough no nonsense Yorkshire train driver, turned tackle shop proprietor, turned angling guide who put it all together and organised the very best mahseer trips at a prime time in the chequered history of this now extremely rare fish.

Sadly, the mahseer fishing on the Cauvery is no more and these beautiful, big, humped-backed mahseer – reaching weights of 120lbs, and possibly more – are threatened by poaching, pollution, dams and hybridisation due to the ill-conceived stocking of a farm bred bluefinned mahseer. There are few brave souls out there working to give these fine creatures a future and you can find out more about the excellent work of Adrian Pinder and the Mahseer Trust HERE –

So with the Cauvery no longer an option those anglers seeking mahseer needed to look north to the Himalayas where the some of the last remaining populations are still clinging on. I’ve already told the story of the white water rafting and fishing trip my friends and I made in 2015 to the Subansiri – a remote and rarely fished tributary of the mighty Brahmaputra River which rises in the North East state of Arunachal Pradesh near the border with China. The mahseer of the powerful Himalayan rivers (Tor putitora) is smaller and sleeker than it’s larger southern cousins, with 30 rather than 50 pounders considered specimens. However, it is every bit as exciting and fishing in these pristine wildernesses remains one of the great angling challenges in life. We had some decent fish to 27lbs from the Subansiri but even here the effects of industrialisation and a growing population were beginning to leave a mark. New hydro-electric dams are under construction and many of these beautiful rivers will no longer support the migratory runs of the mahseer to their traditional spawning grounds.

If there’s one place with mahseer even more remote than Arunachal Pradesh it’s Bhutan – a small landlocked Himalayan kingdom sandwiched between India to the south and Tibet in the north. Bhutan has strict environmental policies and most of its natural heritage, including its mahseer rivers, remains intact. And so plans were hatched for what we hoped would be the mahseer trip of a lifetime in the Spring of 2020. I even wrote excitedly about the prospect a few months earlier – HERE

The remote mountain kingdom of Bhutan is like no other place I’ve been to. And best of all the mahseer remains a highly revered and protected species

Blanking in Bhutan

My good friend and traveling companion Keith Elliott is also editor of Classic Angling, a magazine which devotes a good few column inches to the rich history of mahseer fishing and the lengths people went to in order to catch these amazing fish. As well as being a fellow mahseer nut Keith is also a consummate networker and through his contacts he made the acquaintance of the excellent Chris Ussher – a former Gurkha Regiment officer with a deep knowledge of the region who now runs trekking tours in Nepal. Chris had the contacts to get us onto one of the prime rivers in Bhutan where the Bhutanese royal family are said to have fished and where very few westerners have ever been. To say that there was some excitement about this trip would be an understatement and we had no trouble finding another four anglers to make up the party. And then bloody Covid intervened.

We quickly kissed off our plans for April 2020 and Chris did a sterling job in persuading the airlines to refund our fares. 2021 was out as Bhutan remained under pretty strict lockdown to foreigners and it wasn’t until April 2023 that we were finally able to board our flights to Kathmandu and then on to Paro. Apparently this last leg would not only give us a dramatic view of Everest and the High Himalayas on the way in but also some buttock clenching moments as the pilot swoops down through a number of tight mountain-lined S bends in order to access the only piece of flat land in the entire kingdom. Excitable You Tube videos describe this as the most dangerous approach to any international airport in the world and whilst it was certainly not one for nervous passengers it was actually rather fun and we never felt at risk.

Our river, the Sun Kosh, was still two days journey away over high mountain passes littered with rock falls that require major road reconstruction after almost every monsoon season. We spent the first night in a traditional Bhutanese ‘eco lodge’ where the hosts offered us a warm welcome, our last comfortable bed for a week, a distinctly ordinary curry and some undrinkable local hooch. We quickly discovered that Bhutan is no place for those expecting fine dining but luckily Chris had employed some superb camp staff who fed us well by the river despite having only the most basic of facilities with which to work.

We were up early the next morning for the four hour drive to Dagana Bridge where we were to meet up with the rafting crew. Our fishing party comprised Keith Elliott, Mark Edwards, Adrian Palmer and myself – all veterans of various foreign fishing expeditions and well used to life under canvass in pursuit of giant fish. We were joined by Ian Pett from the Mahseer Trust, a guy with considerable experience of fishing in the sub-continent and Richard Vainer, a skilled and adventurous fly fisherman who is one of the few people ever to have landed a Goliath Tigerfish on the fly. Group leader Chris had caught mahseer from the Sun Kosh on a reconnaissance trip a couple of years before and our head guide Jigme had worked on a WWF mahseer research programme on other rivers and had landed a fair few mahseer of his own. Now I’m not claiming we were the world’s best anglers by any stretch but it’s fair to say that between us we had the gear, knowledge and experience to catch our share of any mahseer that might be hungry as we drifted past their lairs. Our confidence was such that we even found room for Keith’s nephew James who planned to film the whole adventure.

With the Everest peaks poking through the clouds, elephants visiting the camp and transport by raft through some exhilarating rapids Bhutan offers a great experience to the angling adventurer.

The Sun Kosh itself was a little smaller than the Subansiri that we fished eight years earlier but it had all the same features. Fast rapids plunging into deep gorges carved out of the rocks as a result of powerful monsoon floods. Wide sweeping bends and long shallow riffles that any serious fly angler would die to fish. And best of all, virtually no people to be found along the entire course of our intended route until we got close to the Indian border on the final day. Rumour has it that the Sun Kosh had produced fish to over 70lbs, far in excess of anything landed in the rest of the Himalayas. So we knew that a very special fish could be on the cards but were they there in any numbers? This question was soon answered on the drive to the rendezvous point. Jigme ordered the driver to stop beside a cliff overlooking the upper reaches of our river where a small stream created exactly the type confluence so beloved by mahseer. We had been told that there were several of these on our rafting route and that these spots needed extra attention. I could soon see why as 100 feet below us, drifting in and out of the broken water where both streams met, was the biggest concentration of mahseer I had ever seen. There must have been 100 fish in that shoal including several serious beasts that would represent a fish of a lifetime for any one of us. It was a very excited group of anglers that climbed back on board the bus for the final leg of our journey. And that was about as good as it got – I’m sorry to say.

Spot the fish – to give some idea of the size of these mahseer this shot was taking from 100 ft above the river!

Bloody Dams

As we began our slow drift down the river everything looked wonderful. There was that blue/green tinge to the water that you get in rivers that flow down from the ice-fields. We pinged out a few exploratory casts with our lures on route without too much expectation as the fishing doesn’t really kick off in these places until we’ve left the road and the rest of the human race behind. That night we camped on a sandy beach and Chris heightened our anticipation by catching a small mahseer of a couple of pounds on the fly. With the morning often being bite time for mahseer we went sleep dreaming of violent takes and singing reels. I got up early the next day and immediately sensed that the river looked different. It had risen 18 inches or so and was carrying extra colour. It felt lifeless. Assuming there must have been some unforeseen rain higher up the catchment we fished on regardless but for no reward. The river slowly dropped back in the afternoon but the fish didn’t come on the feed. The next morning was the same and by be third day we realised that this wasn’t rain but a daily release of cold, murky and deoxygenated dam water further upstream. All fish hate this and none more so than the mahseer. Our trip was a wash out.

Gorgeous mountain streams but those wires led to a place which marks danger for the few surviving mahseer populations

There’s not much more to be said as the sum total of many thousands of casts was a grand total of three chocolate mahseer on spinners and one golden on the fly with the ‘biggest’ being Adrian’s fish of barely four pounds as opposed to the 40 pounders we were seeking. Things got so desperate that Mark and I resorted to fishing with marmite flavoured bread paste in a sandy slack next to camp on the fourth day. A handful of baby mahseer succumbed to these tactics none of which weighed more than a few ounces.

Meagre reward for the fishing adventure of a lifetime – but there’s always another river somewhere

Did I regret going? Absolutely not, for Bhutan was an incredible experience and is quite unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been. The scenery is amazing and the people warm and friendly. But the insatiable demand for electricity from the burgeoning populations of neighbouring China and India coupled with the lack of any other natural resources has seen the construction of more and more hydroelectric dams to the detriment of the mahseer.

Would I return? Possibly, if time and money allow (Bhutan has a daily tourist tax and is not a cheap destination) but only to a dam free river of which a couple remain. One thing is for sure, those of us afflicted by the mahseer bug will find difficult to accept that we will never again cast our lures or flies into the foaming waters of a Himalayan torrent in search of that electrifying jolt, and terrifying rush, of a big golden mahseer as it heads off downstream. There will always be a river somewhere, calling us back….

[Note:- The mahseer in southern India is not known as the “Golden Mahseer” anymore – it is the Hump-backed Mahseer now scientifically named Tor remadevii. The Golden Mahseer (Tor putitora) is confined to the north of the sub continent.]