Iguela, Gabon. Surf fishing at sunset

Iguela, Gabon. Surf fishing at sunset, a photo by Nicola Zingarelli on Flickr.

If you notice, this image has been cropped on the horizontal side. The reason is that I didn't have a tripod with me on that trip, and had to put the camera on top of the cooler, and a corner of it was visible in the shot. The sunset on the western coast of Africa is pretty dramatic, and even though the colors have been saturated they're not far from what we could see every evening.

www.nicolazingarelli.com
www.caranx.net

Fly fishing at the Azores

Fly fishing anyone? This shot has been taken in a small island at the Azores, Flores. The small rivers are full of Rainbow Trouts, as aggressive as they get. In some rivers they are bigger, in others they are small, I mean, very small. yet they are great fun and boy, ain't the landscape amazing?


Here you got a couple of shots I took from a bridge overlooking one of those rivers, Rio Grande, well, big river... All right, is a small island so this is a big river, correct? The guy who's fishing is my friend Boris, shorts, sneakers and a too powerful of a fly rod, but we didn't exactly know what to expect

This photo is from a smaller creek with fewer trouts, yet a tad bigger. I enjoyed very much shooting Boris while he was fishing and also had a chance to take some landscape images for myself. I was carrying the tripod all over the place, playing with the flash and finally I left some room for the cameraman filming the whole thing.


I wandered a bit, looking for a spot I liked and finally found a bunch of hydrangeas overlooking the water. I took three different exposures and mixed them in PhotomatixPro3 for an HDR image, which I actually like a lot. Flores Island is an amazing place, think about visiting

Maldives, an image or two

I haven't wrote that much about my latest trip to the Maldives. It has been OK. Nothing spectacular but we had some decent jigging and nice popping as well.

Few images for you of this November's Safari, I will be back there in February and I hope I will have more stuff to show

This is my friend Albert showing a decent size Barracuda caught on a jig. The fish pulled hard and fooled me into thinking it was another beast. At the beginning we all said "Doogtooth" because the drag was screaming pretty loud and the line running fast, but the lack of stamina of the fish put our hopes down a bit. A nice fish nevertheless. Many people hate Barracuda and I think they're quite good fun critters

Eugeni in a tough situation, A GT took his lure and is heading back o the reef. The heavy drag settings are very tricky to use, especially when there's no gunwale to support your knees.

Snappers are always among my favourite fish to shoot. Then storm helped creating a bit more of atmosphere.

A bit of hard work near sunset. A small atoll in the distance reminds us we are in the Indian ocean, at the Maldives.

Another snapper in daylight. The red color in contrast with the blue sky really makes for a dramatic contrast. There's a main light on camera right, a Nikon SB600. I exposed for the sky and the flash filled the subject probably at 1/4 of power

The local band playing at night, around the campfire in a desert island

GT from shore...kid me not!

I have been fishing the tropics for about 20 years now and one of the finest memory I have is the day I landed my first GT from shore. This happened some 3 years ago, faaaaar away from home, in Australia. Thanks to the courtesy of Damon Olsen, the owner of Nomad Sport Fishing (http://www.nomadsportfishing.com.au/), I had the chance to join my friend Bertrand "Frencho" Picarda and a group of "crazy" Japanese to a trip to Kenn reef, in the Coral Sea 300 miles away from the nearest Ozzie beach.

After British Airways had lost both my luggage and rod case, here I am, with my plastic bag full of stuff I had to buy to survive my week offshore, a borrowed popping rod from Bertrand and a borrowed jigging rod from Neil, at Neil's tackle in Brisbane. I had my reels, that was pretty cool, they where in my backpack, and I had my Nikon, in my hand luggage as well.

Late in the afternoon we boarded the Odyssey, the 75ft aluminum mother vessel together with the Japanese friend and off we went for a 36 hours cruise to the lost reef.

During the week of fishing I have seen two of the biggest GT I ever saw, landed by Bertrand and Hippo, one of the Japs. The reef where alive and teeming with life, the GTs huge and the surrounding waters full of Tunas, Wahoo and Sharks. Whenever you saw a feeding frenzy with birds diving all over the place, you would run with the skiff there and have plenty of sashimi in a blink of an eye. Imagine a large reef, so far away from shore where commercial fishing is not only prohibited, but also enforced. During our stay we had few times the airplanes of the Ozzie Navy patrolling the area to see who we where and what where we doing. Magic!

Well, to make a long story short, in the 4 days we spent at Kenn reef I had the time to make friends with Mogi-san, one of the gurus of Japanese jigging, Kenji Konishi, the creator of the Carpenter brand of rods and lures, and learn a trick or two about GT fishing. But it has been the very last day, just before departure, that I saw the light. The skiff dropped us on a strip of sand surrounded by reefs, once shallow but now at high tide plenty of water for the predators to swim in it. We started casting hoping to see a sign of life and I had a Green Jobfish following the stick bait on the second or third cast. A beautifully painted Coral trout followed and after a short struggle I managed to land it. It was then time for a GT to attack my Big Foot stick bait, not a big guy but who damn cares, it was my first GT ever landed from shore and was worth its weight in gold. One of the Japs soon followed and then Kenji landed his as well, you can see in the vertical image. Is hard to try to explain how exciting is to catch one of the strongest and largest predator (thus none of ours were spectacular, fish up to 30kg have been landed from shore) with your feet solidly attached to mother earth. No vessel pulling, no skipper motoring, no drift dragging. Just you, yourself and the critter. Each and everyone doing his best to survive.

I fish too much from boats nowadays but is well sculptured in my mind the memory of each and every fish I have caught from shore. This is where you can see the difference between a man and a kid, I kid you not!

Thanks again Damon and every one in the trip. I had to borrow stuff from many of you and will always be grateful. Hope to see you again soon.

Guethary, the beauty of the French Basque country

Well, the idea was to travel to the Delta of the Ebro river for the long weekend but it suddenly changed to a more family oriented plan when our friends Silvia and Pepe invited us to their house in Guethary, in the Basque area of France, very close to the border with Spain on the Atlantic side. We knew this place from before and accepting the invitation was an easy task, such is a beautiful area and such good hosts we had.

Travelling to the Basque country is quite a long journey from Madrid but is a pleasant trip altogether. You go from the up and down roller coaster of the "Sierra", the mountains nearby Madrid, to the flat lands of Castilla and finally among the green hills of the Spanish Basque country.

Once you cross the border with France and head to San Juan de Luz, the first major town along the coast, you start appreciating the mixed feeling you get from being so close to the sea and yet fully immersed into a green and agricultural landscape. Cows everywhere, surfers with bikes and their boards heading to the beaches, happy campers and all different kind of tourists, mostly relaxed and laid back.

Guethary itself is a nice and tidy little village. Not many houses, not terrible traffic, and a smooth atmosphere, peaceful and enjoyable. What really gathers your attention is the buildings. Is very unlikely to see a house that is "out of tune" with the other ones, the vast majority of them maintained the typical Basque style and are very much well taken care of. Freshly painted, shiny wooden windows, beautiful gardens and nothing around that mess up with the overall beauty.

This is a part of the world where people enjoy being outside, dining outside, drinking outside. Bars are pretty much everywhere, as well as restaurants, with many along the seaside, something, I assume, we all love.
During our stay we "tested" few of them and apart from one, they all rated from good to excellent.
Since the weather was not so great we decided to burn some calories walking with my friend's 4 dogs. I think I have a pretty decent idea of the geographical map of the town itself, as well as the close beaches. Of course both my friend Pepe and myself carried around the Nikons in search of decent images, and the beach was quite a hot spot for some shooting.

Last but not least we had the opportunity to grab an idea of what the "Cesta Punta" is. The typical Basque game also known as the "Pelota Vasca" really caught my attention for being so fast and entertaining. To add thrill to the game we watched, a local "howler" entertained us and blew our ears, yelling like a mad man (as he probably was) for a good 20 minutes. Then, disappointed with the referee he abandoned the court with major relief for those sitting at least in a 50 meters circle around him!

No fishing this time, just hundreds of shots with my aged D80. Some you can find here. Many thanks to our good friends for allowing us to repeat such a nice trip, we truly enjoyed it.