A short story from Ninian
Smoking Trout

When I was seven my father took me and a couple of friends on my first fly-fishing trip. It was a day trip to the Thiririka River in the Aberdare mountain range. From our suburban home to the river took about three hours, but it felt as if we had traveled thousands of miles and into a different world. The Thirika flows through the most magical forest; full of lianas, tall dense trees and groves of giant tree-ferns that towered above our heads. To my eyes, they looked just like they did in my dinosaur books. On that and subsequent trips we fed ravenously at hard-earned picnics, played in the river, laughed, marveled at the nature all around us and even had moments of solitude as we hunted our quarry alone.

We only caught the occasional small rainbow trout. I doubt we ever caught anything bigger than a quarter of a pound, but it instilled in me the understanding that fishing for trout was not just about fishing for trout but something much more.

As we grew up we added to our list of rivers. Names such as the Gakuru, Chania, Gatamayu, and the Sirimon became part of our lives. Most of these rivers flow off two big ranges, the Aberdares and Mount Kenya. They are all cold, clear, fast-flowing small streams. The wild and wily browns and rainbows have to be painstakingly stalked, and there is often no room to cast. The technique is almost never “upstream dry fly casting” but a much baser, yet skillful, set of moves that involves dapping over bushes or downstream wet fly. I can count on one hand the number of fish of over a pound that I have caught in these streams and I remember each vividly. As kids we never caught fish that, as one of my friends put it, “had shoulders”.

Around my 20th birthday rumors began to circulate about huge trout in the high-altitude lakes on Mount Kenya. The mountain itself is just over 17,000 feet high, wild and beautiful. Vivienne de Watteville (who spent time on Mount Kenya in 1928) wrote of the mountain and its lakes: “It was not merely a single mountain… it was whole country of its own and parts of it were unexplored…descriptions of its wild grandeur, its glaciers and precipices, its valleys full of flowers and its surprisingly blue tarns set down here and there in the wastes of rock, filled me with a longing to be off.”

Many of the “blue tarns” are at over 11,000 feet, icy cold and clear, fed by glacial melt water. These lakes had been stocked years ago and the rainbow tout there were now monsters. Only a few people had the privilege of casting on these waters and I know that fish of over eight pounds have been caught in them. Most fishermen get to these lakes by helicopter, or arrive most of the way up the mountain by plane. In our twenties this was not an option, so we would hike up the mountain and camp by the lakes for a few days. In our minds the names of trout streams were quickly replaced by the names of lakes: Alice, Ellis, Michaelson and the Carr. At last we were catching fish with shoulders.

My favorite lake on Mount Kenya is Lake Michaelson; it lies at the bottom of the Nithi Gorge, a spectacular deep gash in the eastern side of the mountain. On my first trip there we found that large numbers of two and four pounders swam in a holding pattern off a beach of pumice and lava pebbles that had been formed where a little stream flowed into the lake. If I close my eyes now I can remember sitting on that beach resting, watching my friends casting. Gazing upwards and all around we were almost surrounded by the 2000-foot cliffs of the gorge. The valley runs east to west and as our equatorial sun rose way down the valley; its light would wake us in the tents at dawn when we would have to break the ice in our boots to get out in time to fish the morning rise. The sun would then travel directly over our heads through the day and set over the main peaks that we could just glimpse through the gap between the walls of the gorge to the west. When the sky was blue it seemed especially vivid, the clouds when they came were close and moved softly around us, and the rock and water changed their hues constantly. Every nuance of light and colour was amazing.

The joy of fishing for trout is as special to me as the cooking and eating of it. On our fishing expeditions, we have trout simply fried, trout in breadcrumbs, curried trout, trout sashimi and grilled trout.

One of our most inspired meals was created from a craving for hot smoked trout. One of my friends gathered bunches of wet heather and piled them next to the fire. We watched carefully, with amusement and growing understanding, as he buried the embers of the fire under a layer of heather, then gently placed three fish on the bed, and then covered them with another layer of heather. In 20 minutes we had some of the best hot smoked fish I have ever tasted. It felt so good to eat those fish straight off the bed of leaves using our fingers after a long day’s fishing in such a spectacular place, and to know that we were the only people for many, many miles around.

We have added a trout recipe to go with this story to our recipes page at “Recipes from the Bush”.

Best wishes from Nairobi

Lara and Ninian
April 2005

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