While fishing at Zambia’s Matoya Lodge recently, on the upper Zambezi river, the wind got up quite strongly and the tigers went off the bite.

After some hours of fruitless casting at tigers that weren’t interested in feeding I had to come up with another game plan to save myself from wasting precious Zambezi time.

I had long wanted to catch a humpback largemouth bream in the area, having only caught a few of them in my fishing career on different parts of the Zambezi and the Okavango.

I had been paging through the catch record at Matoya’s bar the previous evening and seen that the humpbacks were caught fairly often in a part of the river nearby where there were a lot of sunken tree stumps to provide cover and structure for them.

I asked my skipper to take me to the place and then planned my attack. It was clear from the outset that I was going to need to use something weedless, as the river bottom was strewn with timber. Any lure with an exposed hook was unlikely to come out of there.

I rigged up an 8.5cm Berkley Powerbait “The Champ” Minnow on an Owner swimbait hook, with a small ball sinker Texas rig style, just big enough to get it down to the bottom in the current. I started casting this at any visible structure, trying to get it to sink down next to the stumps in order to target fish holding close to them.

The first hour or so wasn’t very productive at all. I had a few bites from small tigers, which almost destroyed my plastics, but no bream action at all. After that I stopped putting all of my effort into casting at visible structure, and started working the bottom in the area, looking for structure that we couldn’t see. I did get snagged up a number of times and I did manage to lose a few plastics, but then how else does one learn?

While retrieving from another cast I felt a small tap on my line, much like a bass bite. I lifted the rod and felt the fish shake its head. I finally had a bream on. It fought deep and hard and only when it got to the surface could I identify it as a largemouth humpback bream. I was very pleased to have accomplished my mission.

Over the next couple of days, whenever the wind was blowing, I would head back to that area and do some more prospecting for humpbacks. I ended up catching four of these lovely, unusual fish during the trip.

Rhuan Human was fly fishing on the river with us, so I offered to take him and give him a go at a humpie on fly. He was super keens this was a species that he had yet to catch on the long rod. We went to the area and Rhu listened intently to my advice, then made a cast and started stripping. About halfway through the retrieve he hooked up with a very solid male humpback, which was bigger than any of the four that I had caught!

It was such a pleasure to have that extra entertainment during the quiet times for tigers. I love fishing and am always happy to catch fish. Nothing beats figuring out a species or an area and finally achieving success!