Gambia Beach fishing in November 2008.
This was to be my third fishing trip to Gambia’s beaches and I was going with a new pal, “Steve H24” whom I hadn’t previously met but talked with on a fishing forum. Steve has been fishing in the Gambia for 6 years and has much more experience than me at this location.
The flight and 5 star hotel (That’s a Gambian 5 star, which in no way compares to any other country’s 5 star) plus bed and breakfast deal including airport transfers at £450 is great value.
Our accommodation, the Ocean Bay Hotel at Cape Point, Bakau is the best I’ve experienced in the Gambia and nicer than both the 3*** Senegambia or 5***** Kariaba hotels situated on the Senegambia strip at Kololi. Saying that there is not a lot to do around the Ocean Bay unlike the Senegambia area and it’s more likely taxis have to be used to get around sampling local restaurants and bars.
Friday.
Steve and I booked our guides and friends Assan and Tom before getting to the Gambia and they were waiting at our hotel to pick us up after breakfast. We headed for the Atlantic Hotel beach and a mark just to the left of the juice bars, there were a few other Brit anglers already fishing. We had left it until now to start fishing as we intended to get the best out of the big tides. Unlike many guides in the Gambia ours don’t fish from 9am until 4.30pm no matter what the state of play is.
I hadn’t done any rig prep before arriving and so had to dress them from scratch. Steve however was more organised and had baits in the water quickly. He offered me a made up rig for one rod while I made up another. I cast Steve’s rig out and within minutes landed a Cassava of 4 to 5lbs, a sort of Gambian Sea Bass equivalent. (Thanks Steve)
See photo of me and my Casava.
Before leaving the UK I didn’t get around to buying the three travel beach casting rods I intended to and took two 13 foot, 4lb carp rods. Although they have trouble casting 6 oz leads and two large baits, they can easily handle the type of fish we expected to catch. My reels were big pit carp reels and again should have been ok but with hindsight I would have known they are probably not made to handle salt water. These reels over the coming week would both end up sounding like coffee grinders and would have to be sent to their respective manufacturers for a service on my return to the UK.
About 12.30pm Assan landed what Gambians call a Shiny Nose, I can’t see any difference between them and baby Captain Fish but Assan insists they are different; it was put back out as a live bait.
Over the next two hours I caught a couple of Shiny Nose (or should it be Shiny Noses?) and it was obvious to me these were responsible for our baits being robbed within minutes of hitting the sea bed. This was number 57 in my species hunt this year.
See photo
The usual beaches for me on past trips to the Gambia have been deserted ones and so it was a treat to be fishing close to this hotel with its beach restaurants. One such was the Café Nefertiti and Steve and I disappeared for lunch and a few drinks leaving our guides in charge of the rods. We would run back if shouts were heard, we enjoyed our lunch without interruption.
See photo of our view from the restaurant.
That was it for the day and early evening, nothing else was caught, even the bait robbers had mostly disappeared. Steve blanked for the first time in the Gambia but it wouldn’t be his last.
The first two evenings Steve and I tried a couple of local Cape Point restaurants, the Smiling Coast and Hungarian, the latter sort of having two names, the second being The Green Tree or similar. The former wasn’t good serving me some tough lump of overcooked steak claiming it to be medium fillet. The latter restaurant wasn’t too bad.
Saturday.
After Steve and I had breakfast Tom and Assan picked us up at 10.30am (Gambian time, so it would have been a little later!) and we headed for Bijilo beach, not far from Kololi and heading south.
By midday Assan had a couple of Shiny Nose and used one of them with some Bongo, a local caught small fish, and caught a barracuda weighing about 6lbs.
See photo.
Because of bait robbers making life difficult I put a bongo head on in the hope of imitating Assan’s catch of a barracuda or something big.
See photo.
Both Steve and I blanked today; Tom brought in a 3/4lb Butterfish at the last minute.
Sunday.
Steve and I decided to do our own thing today without our guides Assan and Tom and we were joined by Steve’s mate Alfonse the hotel’s entertainer. We headed for a beach known as Radio Sid which is near Banjul and close to the mouth of the river. This beach usually produces good catches for Steve but today we were being robbed yet again and after changing to smaller hooks found it was again Shiny Nose that were the guilty parties. Double elasticised prawns were lasting only minutes.
About 4.45pm I hooked a fish I suspected was a stingray, it kept hugging the bottom but I lost it with a hook pull and was disappointed as it could have been another new species for me.
During the next 45 minutes I was twice cut off, probably by butterfish, and so changed my 60lb mono top hook lengths for 34lb braid in the hope they would be more difficult to chew off. Wire traces were also an option but I’ve always found their use deters bites but did anyway change to them on the bottom hook lengths.
By 7.30 I had only caught a few, Shiny Nose and Steve was still blanking on this trip. We packed up at 8.30pm, an hour or so after high tide and just before doing so Steve broke his duck and landed his first fish of the trip, an immature jack of some sort.
See photo
Alfonse blanked a first for him at Radio Sid.
Monday.
Today we employed Assan and Tom to take us further south and to Gunja. Within an hour some of us were into fish and Steve in particular was making up for the last three days. Steve with a Casava and a Captain Fish; shortly followed by a butterfish and a pesky catfish.
See photos of his first three.
One of my braid hook links was bitten off by a butterfish I’m guessing and you can see how they do it so easily by the gnashers in the photo above, Tom had a Casava.
Pepe (Pronounced Pee Pee I believe) a well known Gambian guide had brought British anglers to the mark and they were there on our arrival. They packed up shortly after and were gone by 4.30pm and I was a surprised especially as it wasn’t high tide until about 6pm. I asked if he was moving somewhere else but no, that was it for the day, 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. no matter what, great!
I changed to wire traces for all baits and used 4.0 hooks on the top with 6.0s for the bottom ones.
It wasn’t long before Steve had a Captain Fish and a butterfish. Steve was having a job keeping baits in the water and I was having the opposite problem!
Tom was also having fun and landed a Captain Fish, Assan and I looked at each other wondering what we were doing wrong. I even stopped putting Belachan paste on my leads as I thought maybe it was putting the better fish off. Perhaps I should have learnt from my previous July trip when the paste only caught me loads of catfish. It works for me in the Mediterranean but that’s not the same as fishing in the Atlantic.
Before we packed up just prior to darkness and around high tide Steve had one more Captain Fish and quite a few catfish. I also had a couple of the pests but was using bigger hooks than Steve and a few fell off and more probably got away without hooking themselves. My idea was I thought right but it didn’t work out so.
Tuesday.
This morning we wanted to head down to Kartung on the Senegalese border but the lads couldn’t get a 4 x 4 vehicle and so we went back to Gunja with a 2 wheel drive vehicle. We were joined by our guide’s mate called Smiler and it’s always handy having him around as he’s good at digging vehicles out of the sand.
We were not surprised to find Pepe and his group occupying our fishing spots from yesterday and they were treading in our footprints! They didn’t catch any fish that we saw yesterday but would have seen Steve running up and down the bank dragging them in for fun.
As we negotiated the sand dunes and passed them one angler rushed to move his rods towards where we were heading, no doubt to stop us getting too close. Even after we set up a good 400 yards further on he still moved his rods closer, in the end he was fishing within 150 yards of Steve.
Between the six of them they only caught one small fish during the next two hours that we saw before it was time for them to pack up just when most anglers would be getting excited about the state of the tide.
Just before they disappeared they would have been no doubt gutted to see Steve again catching a few including a Captain Fish.
See photo.
Shortly after beaching that fish he got another bite and it was a decent fish, a Captain we thought. Steve was not happy when his shock leader snapped about ½ an inch from the knot. We didn’t know what caused it but maybe sharp broken shells which cover much of the beach.
Seconds after casting out and just as I was putting the rod into its holder I had a run. Problem was my bait runner was still loose and with no resistance I think the hook didn’t get a hold. When I tightened up the fish fell off shame it was a good fish to make a run that fast.
Around 4pm I had a small guitar fish.
See photo.
Steve had another three Captains during the afternoon and whatever he was doing it was working. Me? I kept on catching catfish on my now smaller hooks, very sharp 2.0s and I also changed back to 60lb mono hook links. I did manage one butterfish that failed to bite me off.
See photo.
Why Steve was catching more fish than me during the week is debatable but I feel my helicopter rigs became more complicated as the week progressed, Steve’s rigs stayed simple. Just simple loops cut to make short hook lengths from his shock leader worked much better it would seem.
Smiler asked me if he could be included in the report and so here he is (smiling as always) with my butterfish.
While I’m showing photos I suppose I had better include an example of the nuisance catfish.
Again we packed up just before dark and roughly high tide, we didn’t fancy chasing it out in the dark in the middle of nowhere without a mobile signal and a vehicle without 4 x 4.
Wednesday.
Steve was suffering with cramp in both legs today and so didn’t make it. (All that running up and down the beach catching all those fish it wasn’t a problem for me!)
Kartung, as I said before is right on the Gambia/Senegalese border and the beach boundary is split by a river. We arrived at midday in our 4 x 4 vehicle with the tide still going out and hoping to fish the river itself but there was a lot of water coming down and even though we tried there was no way to hold bottom for long. I know a bit about river fishing which my three guides obviously didn’t (Smiler was with us again) as they said the river’s fast flow wouldn’t present a problem.
I did try up-tiding tactics and after casting, let a lot of line out creating a big bow. This allowed the lead to dig in a little but with catfish immediately on the bait pulling the lead out of the sand or mud it was taking off at walking pace, with the river itself running much faster.
I suggested we headed for the beach and the lads said we could return to the river when the tide came in and the flow stopped or slowed. I knew this would not be possible because by the time that happened it would be getting dark and we would be marooned. I didn’t fancy spending the night in a vehicle so close to a neighbouring, African country’s border actually I didn’t fancy sleeping out at all.
There were Senegalese fishermen on the other bank and it surprised me they were fishing with rods and reels. They were nearer to the mouth of the river standing waist deep and seemed to be trotting their baits in the current; I wished I had some binoculars.
Just before leaving the river I had a slack liner and expected to have a catfish or nothing on the end. Not so it was a big fish but in the strong current it soon snapped my 60lb mono at the knot. (My 34lb braid didn’t snap?) Had we not had the 4 x 4 packed I might have stayed but rightly or wrongly the decision had been made, we were off.
We moved a mile or two from the river but couldn’t fish where we wanted because fishermen were netting fish from the shore. A boat rows the net out in a big circle and ten or fifteen people drag the net it back in.
Weed was a problem as it had been in the river and only catfish were being caught. A local fisherman, one of those that swim their baits out and ties the line to a broken off bush placed on the beach, came to tell us we were fishing 300 metres short of where the fish were! Shame he didn’t tell us earlier because it was getting dark and my last cast was a Boris (crack off) and I’d now had enough, I called it a day.
I doubt I will fish in the Gambia again, unlike Steve who often holidays there with his wife and gets a few days angling I go for the fishing alone. After three attempts, the latter being my worst, I think that’s it.
I do hope to again see my friends and guides though and am looking, with Steve, to hiring them to drive us to Guinea Bissau, another African country on the other side of Senegal to the south. The journey will take somewhere in the region of 10 or 12 hours depending where we decide to stay and fish.
I hope the Gambia comes back fishing-wise but the country’s government and others will have to stop letting Russian mother ships pillage their waters.
Thanks to my guides Assan (002207781160) and Tom (002209981413) and to Smiler for your great company and also to my new friend and companion Steve H24.
John Beachcomber.
Fishing in the Gambia November 2008
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