Mark Nicolaides India Part 4

Last time I quickly went over the sort of gear you need to take for a week’s mahseer fishing on the Cauvery River, in southern India. What I’d like to do this time, is to go over the sort of techniques you’d expect to use on a week’s session. Please remember is that I’m not an expert on this type (or any type) of fishing.

The first thing to remember is that whenever you go on a foreign angling break, try to resist the urge to use your own favourite methods that you use all the time back at home – listen to what the locals say and take it from there. Over time, adopting this approach will catch you more fish than trying to show that locals that you know better than do.

If you’re going to go to India for just a single week’s fishing, you’re going to have to learn pretty fast. As I said, listen to your guide and you’ll be fine. Most of your fishing will be fishing with ragi. As you may already know, ragi is a blend of millet and other stuff, rolled into balls around the hook and cast out on a simple ledger rig. Sometimes, you’ll use ‘hard ragi’, which is basically ‘soft ragi’ that has been boiled to create a boilie the size of an orange. This is normally hair-rigged and put out on a simple ledger rig. Once you’ve set up the straight ledger rig (the guide can show how to tie this up, if you want to), the bait is put on and cast out into a likely area. The bait then rolls around the swim a bit before settling down, when you can them hold the rod waiting for a strong pull. If you’ve done quite a bit of river fishing before for chub and barbel, you’ll have not problems. In fact, I reckon you’d have an advantage if you’ve fished for chub and barbel quite intensively in the past. Fishing for mahseer, is really just stepped-up barbel fishing.

You’ll find when fishing with soft ragi you’ll get no end of bites because there are thousands of baby mahseer around that will attack your bait like a shoal of demented piranhas. Honestly, there are zillions of them! After the first four hundred million baby mahseer!!!!!! (or, when you’ve run out of soft ragi), you need to change over to hard ragi. This has the same affect casting out a boilie on a UK lake that’s full of little ‘bits’ that drive you made on paste. The hard bait goes straight through the ‘pain in the neck’ fish and you stand a much greater chance of getting a decent pull a bigger mahseer.

When it comes to hitting bites, you’ve to wait for a strong pull. I mistake I made was thinking that I’ll still on my local river, trying to hit bites from clued up chub. I ended up striking into thin air because I was too quick. What the guides told me was that I need to wait for the rod to almost be pulled in, and then strike. All those missed bites and striking into thin air only just spooked fish out of my swim. Once you get the hang of hitting the bites and waiting for the right moment to strike, things become a lot easier.

When it comes to playing the fish, play them hard when the fish is in clear water and has not been into the rocks (i.e. you line is still undamaged). After it’s been into the rocks, the line will damaged and you’ll have to take it easier on the fish. If the fish actually gets into the rocks and you can feel all that horrible grating on the line, don’t let the line go slack, just ease off the pressure a bit. But remember this, when you hook a decent fish, the chances are it will find some rocks and the line will get frayed.

That’s really about it for the type of fishing I did when I was there, but other anglers took some carp type tackle, cast our free-lined balls of soft ragi and bagged up on loads of smaller mahseer. Another angler also did some fishing with a few spinners, but the rate at which he lost lures out me off a bit. The river is full of lure hungry rocks that will empty your entire box before you know it.

Anyway, I hope that gives you an idea on what sort of things you do to catch these mahseer… as you can see, I just used very basic methods, but they seemed to have worked okay. But there are whole load of other things you can try like using live and dead baits, or even fly fishing.

Part 5 coming soon

Mark