Call of the wild
Nyier Abdou goes in search of the big fish
"The key to roughing it," Dave Dial declares, leaning back in a deck chair on our small fishing boat and smiling in evident self-satisfaction, "is not roughing it."
Dave, a Texan working for Apache Corp in Egypt, hits the nail on the head. One part rugged safari, one part leisurely holiday, our Lake Nasser fishing expedition leaves a good deal of room for easy living. Trolling the waters of the world's largest man-made lake, brightly coloured fishing lures suggestively trailing behind, we ride into an expanse of startling shades of blue.
Tim Baily, the affable adventurer and angling enthusiast behind African Angler tours, pioneered the Lake Nasser safari when he co-founded the venture with local entrepreneur Nabil Abdel- Moete 10 years ago. "We have people coming here from literally all over the world," says Baily. "They want to get back to nature and they're drawn by the sense of adventure."
With fishermen the world over constituting something of an Old Boys Club, African Angler's clientele is predominantly male. Stressed out by their jobs, they wash up on the shores of Lake Nasser harried and tightly wound. Here, says Baily, "they become boys again".
Drawn by extraordinary tales of 200-pound perch, this intrepid reporter and fishing novice was transported from mad, dusty Cairo to the place where Lake Nasser was born -- the Aswan high dam. Blinking in the bright morning sun and tapping into unknown stores of energy after a 5.30am flight from Cairo, we loaded up the boats quickly and set out south, the edifice of Kalabsha temple brooding in solitude behind us.
BACK TO BASICS: As dawn breaks I reach over the side of my boat and dip my toothbrush in the water. Dial, true to his credo, is in the water near his boat -- shaving. The air is crisp and breathing it in is to take a deep draught of something pure and sweet.
Performing one's ablutions in the Nile is something many feel reluctant to imagine when planning a holiday, but it inevitably becomes one of the trip's more inspiring aspects. There is a small shower on the main supply boat -- charmingly referred to among African Angler staff as the "mother boat" -- but as general manager Nabil Abdel-Moete told me, "Everyone asks if there is a shower, so we put one in. But no one ever uses it."
Breakfast is brief, but jovial. The day, like every day out here, is full of promise, and people want to get moving.
THE MAIN ATTRACTION: The morning unfolds slowly, easily, but without much in the way of big fish, which always seem to be being caught on the boat you're not on. Out on the water, Texans Al Buron, also with Apache Corp, and Gary Ryer, with Baker-Hughes, pick through the tackle box, fastidiously choosing bait. Ahmed, our guide, keeps an eye on their choices, ready to veto a bad choice. Bait, as Baily mused, is designed to catch fisherman, not fish.
Lake Nasser's prime asset for the fisherman is its abundance of staggeringly large fish. Baily boasts that most people who come on this safari catch the largest fresh water fish of their life, and both Al and Gary, who are returning for the third and fourth time respectively, attest to this fact. Pictures that line the African Angler's offices and brochures show elated fisherman and their guides buckling under the weight of mammoth Nile perch, usually too big to be held up by one man alone. Most of African Angler's business is repeat business.
International Game Fishing Association (IGFA) records are born and broken here. The largest fish ever caught on an African Angler safari was so big it defied the scale on board, which "only" went as high as 220 lbs. If this fact excites you, you will be interested to know that you have a sporting chance of catching that fish. African Angler has a strict catch-and-release policy and they will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure a fish survives after all the weighing and picture- taking are through.
"We don't kill the fish on this lake," says owner Tim Baily. "We're not here to catch fish and sell them. For us, these fish are more valuable alive than dead. People will come back to catch them."
While outfits running fishing trips on the Red Sea do some brisk business, African Angler remains the only, for all intents and purposes, operator on Lake Nasser. During the fall and spring the weather is consistently clear and temperate -- a real plus for an outdoor excursion. I asked Al and Gary what advantages the Lake Nasser safari has over other trips, not only in Egypt, but elsewhere. Aside from the novelty of the lake, the main draw is the isolation. Most of the time you are the only boat on the water, only occasionally crossing paths with local fisherman. Mobile phones don't work out here -- the definitive escape.
While it's clear that these two are enthusiastic about the trip -- they expect to return in April -- they do offer a caveat. Fishermen from the US, they suggest, are simply used to having more gear. They would expect state-of-the-art depth finders and GPS tracking equipment that maps where the big fish have been caught. They would want to get everywhere faster.
This all seems a bit single-minded to me, since the sometimes hour-long stretches of travelling between spots are significantly fulfiling in other ways -- mainly taking in the dramatic scenery rolling past. Low, sandy hills dot the horizon, floating on a plane of glassy cobalt. Lazy crocodiles slip off a bank into the water. I tried not to think about them when I had my afternoon dip.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: At night the canopy of stars is staggering. Lying on our backs on the decks of our fishing boats after dinner, we're taking turns with one of the countless wonders brought along by gadget-beholden Dave Talbott, another Texan working in Egypt with Apache. Through his binoculars, the belt of the Milky Way dissolves into a dizzying array of lights. It wouldbe positively meditative if it weren't for the racket over on Al and Gary's boat.
In pursuit of the elusive giant vundu catfish, a few of which were spotted by our guides nosing around the boat, the guys are putting out lines. None of them have ever caught one, despite their frequent trips to the lake, and this effort will also be unsuccessful. At dinner, the suspicion falls on the journalist, who seems to bring bad fishing luck.
THE TAO OF FISHING: It's 7am but it's 5pm somewhere and Tom "Doc" Holliday, who works in electronics, is cracking open a beer. His companion, Billy Tomaszycki, a defence contractor for General Dynamics, and I are eyeing him strangely, but truth be told, we're thinking it's not such a bad idea. The sun is shining, our feet are up, and Billy is calling the fish.
For the big game hunter, trolling is a considerably low-key endeavour. Once you've chosen your spot and the lure is in the water, nothing more is asked of you but keeping a grip on your fishing rod, and even then, as time passes without a nibble, which it certainly does, one gets increasingly lax with that grip. By 9am, the spirit is starting to wane. We haven't caught anything but long lines set out by local fisherman, a few weeds, and Billy's hat, which fell in the water.
For all the theories about different lures and a fisherman's inalienable intuition, a lot of fishing is plain dumb luck, which makes fishing, like so many other endeavours, prone to superstition. To each his own, but Doc, changing his snare once again and muttering something to it, assures me that a real fisherman "talks to his bait".
"Mohamed," he jokes, jolting our guide into the conversation. "Where are the friggin' fish?" There is a short beat before Mohamed "Elephant" Ahmed, a 34-year-old native of Aswan's Elephantine Island and a guide with African Angler since its inception, replies -- a beat in which I can imagine how many times he and every guide have heard a variant on this question and conclude that if he never heard it again, it would be too soon. The moment passes and Mohamed smiles sort of smugly. "In the water," he says.
The day wares on, the sun grows hot. "Nyier," says Billy, this time jolting me away from my silent meditation on the water. "It's your turn to call the fish."
"Here fishy, fishy, fishy."
GETTING TECHNICAL: Mohamed, Dave and I are looking down in silent awe and the others on the main boat want to know why.
It's a scorpion, preening himself on the shore where our fishing boats are docked for the night. Dave is brandishing his monstrous zoom lens in a fit of enthusiastic arachno-philia, and Mohamed asks if I want to take a picture. What I want is for the creature not to park itself in front of my boat, where it seems too comfortable.
These, one must remember, are the joys of nature. I've already mentioned the joys of bathing under the bright blue sky, but when it comes to the call of nature, things can be either quite simple (in this case, being a man), or not quite so (that is, my case -- being the only woman). My companions were soon able to make a direct correlation between trips to shore and the number of beers on the boat.
THE BOTTOM LINE: Al Buron, who in four days caught only two fish, still had something to smile about as we exited our boats for the last time at the port of Garf Hussein -- the end of the line for this fishing crew. He caught the biggest fish of the trip, an 80-pounder that he brought in off the shore.
Some 350-400 tourists are brought into Egypt by African Angler. Most of them will catch a fish that makes them want to come back, and most of them will do so. The angler headed for Lake Nasser is a different class of tourist, drawn by something apart from the standard tourist trail. Many will not bother to see Karnak temple or the Pyramids -- or even Cairo. Eco-friendly, cheaper than similar trips in the Americas or Europe, the draw of the Lake Nasser safari is something that Tim Baily laments is tragically underestimated by Egyptian officialdom.
In the decades since Lake Nasser was formed, it seems, people in positions of power have failed to see the potential that Baily spotted in the days he spent here years ago, when a stopover in Egypt became the beginning of a long love-affair with the Nile. "This could be a major centre of tourism," says Baily, who envisions lodges set up on the lake's shores. Authorities, however, fail to "think into the future".
The lake is under the direct authority of the military, which makes wading through the bureaucracy of bringing foreigners there a mighty task. But for Baily and Abdel-Moete, it's also a huge source of revenue loss. "We respect that they need to know who is on the lake," says Baily. "But they need to trust that we'll provide them with the right information."
To get clearance for a tour, African Angler needs to present a photocopy of every traveller's passport three weeks ahead of the trip. Not only does it "look stupid", as Baily notes, but it kills the market for the impulse planner.
"We have never had a problem with security," remarks Abdel-Moete, who gets heated just talking about the problem. "People hear about us, they want to go on the lake for one night -- but we can't do it." Tour operators working in Europe will contact African Angler for bookings, but they have to turn them down because the lead-time falls short of the three week minimum. "We lose 50 per cent of customers because of this."
Putting it all in perspective, Baily scoffs, "There's still this stupid thing about background checks in case of spies." Shaking his head, he remarks, "If I was an Israeli spy, I wouldn't go on a fishing trip."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 27 November - 3 December 2003 (Issue No. 666)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/tr1.htm