EVER since I was regaled by a friend with stories about the golden mahseer, its illusiveness and fighting prowess, a trip in pursuit of it has been on my bucket list. In October, I decided the time had come to strike it off.
The mahseer is India’s iconic sporting fish, offering enormous sporting potential and requiring much skill to catch, spinning or on the fly. It lives in fast-flowing rivers and is renowned for its power, with specimens as large as 100lb having been caught. Traditionally, the local population caught them for food by bait fishing, but there has been a significant decline in stocks. Consequently, in recent years a strict catch-and-release policy has been adopted.
The weather conditions in October are far more to my liking than earlier in the year. I arranged the trip through Field Sports Travel, run by my partner, Liz Cavell-Taylor. We wanted to experience the remoteness of the Himalayas so we decided on a tented camp on the border of India and Nepal. After 48 hours in Delhi to recover from the culture shock of our arrival in India, we were met by Mickey Sidhu, the owner of Himalayan Outback, whose camp we were fishing at. He had not recommended the overnight sleeper from Delhi to Kathgodam but it was an unforgettable experience, although the Orient Express it definitely was not.
HIMALAYAN FOOTHILLS
This story is from the July 2020 edition of The Field.
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This story is from the July 2020 edition of The Field.
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Rory Stewart - The former Cabinet minister and hit podcast host talks to Alec Marsh about the parlous state of British politics, land management and his deep love of the countryside
The gently spoken 51-year-old former Conservative Cabinet minister is a countryman at heart. That's clear: he even changes into a tweed waistcoat for the interview, which takes place at his London home and begins with a question about his precise career status. Having resigned from the Commons and the Conservative Party in 2019, the former diplomat and soldier has reinvented himself, first with an unconventional but promising run as an independent for the London mayoralty (abandoned because of COVID19 in 2020) and then as a media figure, co-hosting one of the country's most popular podcasts, The Rest Is Politics, alongside Alastair Campbell, the former Labour spin doctor.
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