Extreme Fishing (20 page)

As we set foot onto land, the little children rush over to greet us. Scores of them appear from nowhere and I high-five to greet them. It quickly becomes apparent that there are many more kids
on the island than grown-ups, as many of these youngsters’ parents have been casualties of the AIDS epidemic. According to Kenya’s National AIDS Control Council, there are around
1.5–1.7 million people living with HIV out of a population of 43 million. It’s eye-opening to see the effects of the disease so clearly here; in some cases grandparents are looking
after twenty children.

I have a few hours to kill so I teach the kids the
Extreme Fishing
mime, where you cross your arms in an X, cast out a line and reel in the fish. It’s become shorthand for the show
and we are beginning to use it in the opening title sequences more and more.

Gilbert asks if I’m hungry and the crew nod their heads eagerly. He takes us to meet a lady called Paulina in the woods behind the village. She is dressed in a black and white patterned
dress and a headscarf tied at the back to keep the sun off. She is waving a big cake bowl around her head, humming a tune, surrounded by a cloud of flies attracted by the resonance. Inside the bowl
is a gloopy mixture that the flies stick to. These flies are the other main source of food on the island; they contain seven times more protein than steak. They might not taste as good as Aberdeen
Angus but they will keep you alive. I have a go at catching some. Paulina giggles as I hum and do something akin to the ‘Agadoo’ dance – I could do a song from my own album but
that might put them off. I have millions of flies in my face but none in the yellow bowl I’m waving around. I waft it about my head a bit more and look inside: ‘I’ve got
three!’ But I need a plateful and it could take all night.

Luckily this is a TV show so, in the best tradition of TV chefs, Paulina produces a few thousand she’s caught earlier. Who the hell discovered this technique and then decided to make fly
burgers out of the paste? It’s ingenious but all I can say is that they must have been really sick of fish. Paulina poaches the paste in milk – it looks like two mud balls and smells
like acrid green meat. However, the kids love it. It’s their version of M&Ms and they queue up excitedly for some.

It tastes like it smells but certain situations call for a swallow, especially in the presence of such a kind lady. Her love for the children is humbling. I discover that she is in her late
fifties and is looking after sixteen kids on her own. Her selflessness, warmth and goodness make her a privilege to meet. We all fall in love with Paulina.

As we start to prepare to film the next sequence, night fishing for omena, a massive storm comes out of nowhere.

Gilbert says, ‘We need to take cover – it’s a bad storm.’

There is a bit of wind, the clouds turn black and within sixty seconds a hurricane hits. I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s quick,violent and like being mugged by Mother
Nature. We run to a hut; the rain is pouring down, the wind thrashing us. We cover our heads and leg it. One by one we enter the hut. There is a thud, like a melon being split open with an axe.
Alistair has smacked his head into the edge of the corrugated roof and is on the ground. We get him inside where we see the blood is pumping down his face like a waterfall. Everyone is panicking
trying to keep the claret in the bottle. It’s a deep diagonal gash across his skull – three inches long and an inch across. Alistair is in a blind panic; the more worked up he gets, the
more blood he’s losing. I want to slap him.

‘Alistair, calm down. You’re going to be fine.’

His eyes are haunted by an accident he had in 1991, when he was dragged under a car as it screeched to a stop over about fifty metres, subsequently trapping him under it. His bald head still
bears the physical scars from that terrifying incident and now he’s suffering the mental fallout. His heart rate is in overdrive. I use my shirt to stop the bleeding and pinch the wound
together with my fingers. Craig finds a small first-aid kit in his camera bag and I grab the iodine.

‘Right, Alistair, I need you to bring your breathing down. This is going to hurt but you need to breathe through it.’

Donning the latex gloves, I pour iodine into the wound. He whimpers and hums. I tell him to stop humming or he’ll attract the flies and he raises a smile. We clean the wound with water and
sterile dressings, then I cut a dozen thin strips of gaffer tape and begin to pull the wound together with the tape. It’s a crude method of butterfly stitching but all I can say is thank God
I played Jimmy the Porter in
Casualty
.

Alessandra gets on the satellite phone to Helen. She is amazing, and a flying doctor arrives within the hour. The doctor stitches Alistair up properly and he tells us that whoever taped the
wound up was a genius who saved Alistair’s life. I push past Craig and Peter and tell him it was me. He shakes my hand. Peter and Craig groan. The doctor tells Alistair he must rest and there
is no way he can film the night sequence. Alistair is really upset and frustrated, and reluctantly we take him back to the hotel. On the way back, the Machiavelli in me rears his head – if
Alistair’s out of action this could be my directorial debut, my chance to be an actor/director like Tim Robbins, Kenneth Branagh or Mel Gibson. As Mel would say: ‘If any of you have a
bleeping problem with that I’ll put you in a bleeping rose garden. But you have to bleep me first. I deserve to be bleeped first!’

All this megalomania is clouding my mind. I check on Alistair, like Macbeth on Duncan. He’s in bed. He feels OK now and he wants to get up. I push him back down and put another pillow
behind his head. He doesn’t want to be mothered, he wants to direct.

‘Alistair, you’re badly injured. We’ll be fine without you. Besides, I’ve been asked to direct before.’

‘What?’

‘
Doctors
.’

‘
Doctors
? That shitty BBC excuse for a drama?’

Alistair sits up energetically. I push him down again firmly and walk over to the bathroom, returning with a hand mirror.

‘Look at the size of your head!’ I say dramatically. I show him the close-up.

‘Oh, my God,’ he whimpers.

‘You look like one of the waiters in Cabbages and Condoms – you can’t direct a night-fishing sequence looking like that, can you?’

‘No,’ he says, sinking under the duvet.

I tuck him in extra tightly so he can barely move. In my room I don a red cravat, select a Montecristo No. 2 from the thermidor, and I am ready for my directorial debut. I summon the crew
together for a pep talk.

‘OK, guys, this is how I see it.’ I give them the vision. Four guys from the village are standing in front of me looking bewildered, while Gilbert translates. Peter thinks I’ve
been chewing khat.

‘The opening shot is of Gilbert, the fishermen and me heading off into the night. It’s a beautiful balmy night and the stars are shining. Everything is perfect.’

Craig sets the camera up on the shore and I jump in the boat and we head out into the lake. We quickly lose sight of Craig and the crew. It’s pitch-black on the lake and the only way the
fishermen know where they are is by looking at where they’ve come from. It’s Irish GPS. We wait for the crew to catch up and I call out their names, impatiently. Nothing. I get out my
mobile.

‘Craig? Where are you?’

‘Waiting on the bank, watching you fuck off into the night.’

‘You’re meant to be following in the other boat.’

‘You didn’t say that.’

I apologise to Gilbert and the fishermen as we row back to shore. I’m well aware they have livings to make and, although we do pay all contributors, we like them to still carry on with
their livelihoods where possible. I call a meeting but there is immediate dissent in the ranks.

‘Let’s talk to one another, work as a team and direct this sequence together,’ says Craig.

I want to throw a boot at his head, like Ferguson did to Beckham, but I stay quiet. We row out again and crack on with the fishing. We’re floating lamps on the water to attract flies that
are snapped up as tasty snacks by the omena fish.

‘Craig, I want you to film this sequence in a serendipitous way.’

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

‘Don’t force it, just let it happen.’

‘Where do you want me to point the camera, Robson?’

‘At the fish, Craig.’

As we wait for the lamps to be surrounded by fish, the Kenyans sing a song, ‘Naru naru’. I join in.

‘Film it, Craig.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know, my Swahili’s a bit rusty. How’s your Maori?’

I sing the Northumberland folk song ‘When the Boat Comes In’. It seems to go down well.

Fish begin to surround the first lamp. The throwers lower the nets off the side of the boat and the rowers, like me, paddle like crazy to encircle the fish. If our rowing is too slow the fish
will escape. When we’ve rounded them up, we haul them in. It’s back-breaking work and we won’t know until the last moment if it’s been worth it. We have a football-sized
haul of omena, known as silver treasure by the islanders. They usually get thirty or forty times that in a ten-hour period and it’s taken us five hours to film one cast. Not a big haul and
worth about a quid.

We send the fishermen on their way so they can claw back some of the lost time. They will go from lamp to lamp for hours to catch enough to feed the village and make some money. Alistair is on
the shore waiting for us. He is very irritable and feeling sorry for himself. We all tell him it went really well.

‘One of the best sequences of the series,’ adds Peter Prada.

Black Marlin

Alistair is much better the next day and there is no way on God’s earth he is going to miss the black marlin sequence. We fly back to Watamu and are back on a big
white flashy sports boat, with our new Kenyan fishing guide Jackson at the helm.

‘Are you confident we’ll catch today?’

‘Why not?’ he says in his rich-treacle voice.

‘Exactly, why not?’

‘Why not?’

The exchange continues thus for some time.

We’re heading for Sailfish Alley, where I caught my dorado. Jackson and I set three rods, cast the lines and trawl them behind the boat. We’re looking for bonitos with small squid
lures, and within forty-five seconds a reel starts screaming like a small child: Waha! Waha! The line keeps going out and out and out. A bonito wouldn’t take a line like that. Jackson and I
look at each other. We’ve got a black marlin on forty-pound test line. No one’s ready and the tackle’s way too light: the density of a marlin leader line is 150 to 200 pounds
breaking strain. I have to make a decision. Do I hard-play the fish and snap the line? (The problem being that the type of hook for bait fish isn’t dis solvable – although the theory is
that nature will take care of it and it will eventually come out like a splinter.) Or do I try to land this fish on tackle meant for a fish a third of the size? As I’m mulling it over the
marlin blows out of the water like a missile. Craig misses the shot. We’ve all been caught on the back foot.

For the next two hours I play the fish and let the marlin run and run until he tires. I get the fish close to the boat for over an hour, but then it turns tail and I have to start all over
again. It’s a titanic battle that, slowly, I’m beginning to win. I bring the marlin back towards the boat while Craig puts the underwater camera beneath the waves to film the vast fish.
It’s a large male. Females are up to three times bigger.

To count as a catch I need to get as much tension on the line as possible so that Jackson is able to get hold of the leader (the last bit of line). I reel with all my might until the black
marlin rises like a submarine. I can see the leader. Jackson puts a glove on and ‘bills the fish’, grabbing its lethal bill to make it safe. Just as he’s about to get hold of the
last bit of line to confirm a catch, the fish turns and bolts. The bill flicks Jackson into the air and he bombs into the water behind the boat.

‘Jackson! Jackson!’ We all shout helpful advice from the side: ‘Don’t thrash!’ ‘Get back on!’ It is very telling that no one contemplates jumping in. He
leaps back on board. I am freaking out but Jackson is calm.

‘Let’s carry on,’ he says.

After nearly two hours he gets his hand on the leader again and I have caught a
Makaira indica
. Jackson tags the marlin to monitor migration patterns, removes the hook and then releases
the giant, as heavy as a racehorse, back into the blue. He sends up the black flag so that everyone can see I caught a black marlin today.

My knees are buggered, my back’s broken, but what a hit of pure adrenalin. I am in a state of manic elation. My pulse is racing, my breathing is short. I don’t want it to end. I
don’t want to go back. But I have to.

‘Hakuna Matata, Jackson.’ I say, slapping him on the back. It loosely means ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ in Swahili.

‘Why not!’ exclaims Jackson.

November 2009, World Tour, Series 3

The Amazon River is so vast I can see it from 38,000 feet in the air. This freshwater system is home to over 5,600 known species of fish, possibly even accounting for 60
per cent of the fish reported to exist on the planet. Many species remain undiscovered, such is the complex network of tributaries that branch off the world’s second-longest river, after the
Nile. And I am going deep into the dense jungle in search of three legendary denizens – the piranha, the arowana and the arapaima. Coming with me are three other monsters of the deep: Craig,
Peter and sadistic director Jamie.

We board a flight to Manaus and head deep into the planet’s lungs, the Amazon rainforest. Amazonia comprises 40 per cent of the world’s remaining rainforest, which filters carbon
dioxide and pollutants out of the atmosphere. It’s our medicine cabinet, and one of the most bio-diverse places on Earth, home to extraordinary creatures and plant life that we are only just
beginning to discover. Scientists believe that less than 1 per cent of plant species have been identified. I am rattling with facts and swept up by the ecology, so it seems strange to be setting
foot into a huge city slap-bang in the middle of the rainforest.