You find yourself standing on the edge of a coral lagoon in the middle of the Indian Ocean, there is no dry land for three hundred miles and you are up to your waist in a rushing tide. The tender boat is bobbing over a two-mile deep drop-off, waiting for your signal to be picked up. It took you sixty hours to get where you are standing now and you refuse to give up, knowing that a huge GT must pass by this point and its going to happen any second now.
Bassas da India counts as one of the furthest flung places in the world where you can fish, located in the centre of the Mozambique Channel, that divides Madagascar and Africa, this partially formed atoll is concealed under a high tide with a decaying shipwreck that offers the only resemblance of dry land, for the time being. This reef has caused countless shipwrecks through the centuries and large cannons and huge anchors have become embedded in its corals, surrounded by shards of china and bits of lead, creating an eerie glimpse into a long forgotten era of treacherous seafaring.
Contributed By
Francois Botha
I remember sitting on the banks of the Zambezi River, starring at a photograph that Henry Gilbey took and I knew that I had to get into photography. A few years later and I am lugging 20 pounds of camera gear around flats and rivers of the world, trying to get that perfect shot. As a professional fly-fisherman, I consider it as part of my job to take a good photograph. These remote and pristine places around the world are disappearing at an alarming rate and simply taking a ‘grip and grin’ photograph of a client holding the fish of a lifetime is not enough. I think photographs that capture the fly-fishing experience and environment document a larger and more important audience than we might think.
