Where the Fish Roar: Hunting Zimbabwe's Tigerfish

A battered Lefty's Deceiver dangles from the mouth of the author's first tigerfish

Nymphs work well for the bream

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A spinning, wildly gyrating silver fish with black stripes and orange fins exploded from the water like a Trident missile gone badly wrong and crashed back into the now very disturbed water.

"Great flyin' frijoles!" I screeched. "What the hell is that thing?" "Bwana, dat's your tigahfeesh," came the grinning reply. "You like heem, huh?" "He's okay!" I replied.

After nearly five minutes of insane antics, the two-pound tigerfish—no trophy but enough to get and keep my interest for a while—surrendered to the net. I was aghast to see that, even captured, the tigerfish was 100 percent attitude, with the equipment to back it up.

It lay in the net, continually snapping its jaws with lightning speed, obviously hoping I'd be foolish enough to get my fingers near its world-class maw. Having paid the price for getting my hand too close to other species' toothy mouths, I removed what was left of the Deceiver—which wasn't much—from the tigerfish's jaws with a set of hemostats.

I unceremoniously dumped the deranged thing back into the water, where it instantly vanished with a powerful swipe of its orange tail.

Unconventional Chumming
So the tigerfish were eating rocks? Well, no. The rocks were actually sound chum, meaning that they were thrown into the water so that nearby tigerfish would hear the splashes and come running for a look-see.

When the tigerfish arrived on the scene, they smelled the kapentas (the meat chum) in the water and assumed a massacre was going on. Naturally, when one saw my fly, it immediately attacked. Although several bait-fish patterns worked, I found that 2/0 and 3/0 Deceivers with light bodies and darker backs were the most consistent.

The next few days found me catching bigger and better tigerfish in and around the mouth of the mighty Zambezi, a river that has given up virtually every International Game Fish Association (www.igfa.org) record on tigerfish, including every freshwater tippet-class record, freshwater line-class record, and the all-tackle record of 21 pounds, 13 ounces.

Tigerfish don't run all that far when hooked, but because their runs are sudden and swift, a decent reel with a disc drag is called for. Wire tippets, nine-foot 2X leaders, and nine-foot 8-weight fast-action rods served very well.

Tigerfish aren't the only game fish prowling Zimbabwe's Zambezi River and Lake Kariba, mind you. One of the most fun and attractive species is the three-spot Mozambique, called bream hereabouts, which lives under the floating mats of hyacinth and eats aquatic insects and small forage fish.