Gearing up!

In amongst the preparations for this fortnight's two 5night school camp's, laying water pipes and prepping the new croc site for power & lawn and then of course the obligatory d.cap mog soaked, meaningful, solve all the problems in the world by 2am on Saturday morning, conversation with the bwana, I finally made it out on the water on Sunday afternoon for a test run of the new 'seaclet weepon'. After some not so professional fishing and bloodshed from a wayward cast which caught the wrong side of a rather thorny tree, I finally got serious and tempted this bull of a fish to come out from behind a stump for a tasty treat. Funnily enough, the cast itself was into a hole a croc had just come out of. The fifteen odd minutes that followed had me wondering at times if what I had on the end of the line was in fact a croc, vundu or anything other than 11lbs of tigree. This cheeky bugger stayed well out of sight till just before we netted it. Not a record, but certainly an excellent fight that had me thinking that if it was a tiger, I was finally going to break that elusive 7kg barrier I've come so close to but just can't seem to pass. Whatever size it was, this one and the other strikes I had for the afternoon proved that come the warmer weather and upcoming 'challenges', my new rig is going to devastate the tiger and the competition.

I wasn't the only one to take a noteworthy Tiger this weekend. In fact, when all was said and done, mine was a full pound less noteworthy than that of the Bwana. His 12lber was taken right in front of the lodge on Saturday afternoon and I watched on in horror and jealousy from the boma as it was hauled onto the deck. My only retort to this outrage is that the 12 was taken on a bait whereas the 11 was some classy presentation of a carefully prepared artificial lure, the nature of which I shall not reveal until it is too late for the 'Okavango Okes' to do anything about.

I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time on the water on Saturday afternoon once the latest group departs, honing my skills and seeing what excitment the warm weather and clear water will bring for us.

Moving away from the fishing now and onto the lodge, it seems for now the jumbo have given up digging the water pipes up and are content to just mill around on the property looking for natives to chase or crops to destroy. That's not to say they won't get bored of that and come back to annoying me soon. My latest scheme is to pipe water into a favorite rainy season hippo wallow just outside the campsites to try give them something else to amuse themsleves with. But with the lights and power going into the camping areas this weekend, they should behave a bit better from now on anyway. We'll see!!

Haven't heard much from the builders of late. But they should be or should I say will 'hopefully' be in close to the end of the month to do the long overdue renovations and maintenance on the buildings. Once that's done, we'll be on the right track and better equipped to handle the latest surge in popularity we're having.

For now though, we plod along with the usual routine....Adios Hombres;)) El Commodorrey