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Hemmingway's Nile Perch
Hemmingway's Nile Perch Egypt,fishing
About 20 years ago I was window shopping in the lovely little
village of Long Melford in Suffolk, England. The mile long main
street of mainly Georgian shops is an antique collector's
heaven. Towards the top of the village is a specialist shop
selling stuffed animals, birds and fish which are not usually my
type of thing.
My eye was caught by a gigantic stuffed fish which I did not
recognise, so I had to go in to have a look. The inscription on
the very old glass case showed that this rather ugly, but
immense fish was a Nile Perch of 124 lb in weight, and caught by
Ernest Hemmingway himself. Having hooked this monster it took
him over two and a half hours to land it on the shore of the
Nile, the boat he was in being too small to safely land it in
any other way.
My imagination being caught up with this amazing creature, which
looks rather like a cross between a fat pike, a perch with
enormous and sharp teeth and a freshwater shark, I could not but
help myself researching into this phenomenon of the Nile.
I discovered that this fish, native of Africa, is one of the
most sought after by anglers, it being easily the largest
freshwater fish in the world, with only the rare manseer in
India and Mekong catfish reaching anything like the size of the
Nile Perch. This fish is a voracious predator, and when
introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1960`s it decimated 95 per
cent of the
local fish stocks.
Unlike the stuffed one I saw originally, which had yellowed with
age, the Nile Perch is silver in colour with a blue tinge. They
can grow to over two meters and weigh over 200Kg (440 lb). As
food the Nile Perch is a very important fish in Egypt, fishing,
aquaculture as well as being avidly sought by local fishermen
mean that it is often on the table. They are a bit oily which
makes them difficult to dry, but have a pleasant and distinctive
flavour.
Many of Africa's large river basins and lakes support this fish
including Lake Maryut in Egypt which has brackish water, and
Lake Nasser. Many people catch the biggest fish of their lives
in Lake Nasser and it is considered a centre of sporting
excellence by big game fishermen the world over. The largest
recorded Nile Perch caught from Lake Nasser weighed 176 kg (392
lb) and fishing from the shore with a lure can bring in fish of
20 to 100 lb.
The larger Nile Perch tend to be in the large Egyptian lakes if
you are a keen specimen hunter, however one of these days I hope
to catch one of these incredible fish on the River Nile itself,
just like Hemmingway's Nile Perch in Long Melford, Suffolk, but
I suspect my own Nile Perch will be a mite smaller than his.
Interested in this subject? Try this link for more of the same<.a>
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