ANGLERS MACHEE

Return to the land of Lunker's, Mteri 2006
Part 1

In keeping with the phases of the moon, we scheduled our recent trip to Mteri, Zimbabwe from the 25th to 31st of July 2006. We departed from Johannesburg at 3am and headed North towards Musina. Our crew comprised eight people traveling with a VW Microbus towing a VX70 fitted with a 150hp Mercury motor and, a Toyota Hilux towing a splash bass fitted with a 60hp Mercury motor. We arrived at the border at approximately 11am and crossed into Zimbabwe within an hour. We reached Mteri at 3pm and while a couple of the guys stayed at the lodge to unpack, a few of us decided to spend our first Zimbabwean sunset hunting monster bass. The dam level has risen by at least 7 to 8 feet and many of the fishing spots that we knew from the previous year no longer held fish. We were informed by the lodge manager as well as regular fishermen that a some bass had already spawned while others were waiting for the next full moon. With this in mind, we focused our efforts on spawning beds and reed structure that hugged the shoreline. We also targeted staging bass by fishing reed structure (snortabela) in deeper water close to the shore. We noticed numerous swirls and quickly discovered that bass reacted aggressively to a skitter pop as well as horny toads that were skipped across the surface. Although we had a number of bass rise for our lures in our first few hours on the water, we were unsuccessful in landing any. We were awake early on the morning of the 26th and with a game plan in mind headed towards the old dam wall. Our fishing tackle used were Gloomis GLX rods fitted with Calais 100 reels and spooled with 20 pound Gary Yamamoto Sugoi fishing line with Owner 5'0 wide gap hooks. We rigged our hooks with watermelon red horny toads and fished the weeded shoreline and cattails using various retrieval speeds. It was an exciting start to great fishing as we caught many fish over 2kg. Later that day we made our way to the main river channel and fished deeper water. By than the wind had picked up considerably which prompted us to bump chartreuse and white skirt terminator spinner baits against flooded palm trees. Within minutes I felt a dull snag on my line and instinctively striked and set the hook. As the line tore off my reel and the fish headed for deeper water, the only thought that nagged the back of my mind was "barbel" as the fight went on and the fish surfaced, my eye caught the dark green flash and immediately sparkled as we landed our first 3.2kg bass

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