Venturing where very few fly anglers have gone before, Leonard Flemming and Ben Pellegrini unleash their inner furries and take a trip to the Congo River catchment in Zambia in search of blue yellowfish, aka the majestic mpifu. All photos by Leonard Flemming and Ben Pellegrini. As featured in The Mission Issue 47 (Sep/Oct 2024).

Meet the furries 

A recent protest in Cape Town brought to my attention for the first time the phenomenon of furry fandom. To put it mildly, I was absolutely gobsmacked. Young people were protesting for their rights to be recognised as “furries” where, due to an interest in anthropomorphic animals (or possibly some level of psychosis), they dress up as and embody animal characters.  

What’s even more mind-boggling is the fact that some furries actually believe that they are not entirely human, but rather an animal trapped in a human body. I mean that makes perfect sense, right, to believe you are a panda, a squirrel or a horny honey badger to the extent that you wear a synthetic animal suit in the concrete jungle? Strange too that furries appear to only ever identify as cute and cuddly critters. Forget HR asking you to choose your pronouns for your email signature when you can identify as a quokka or an otter. Why, I wondered, does no one fight for the right to dress up as a sharptooth catfish or a blaasoppie?

I’ll admit almost all my instincts lent towards dismissing this lunacy, but then I gave it a little more thought. In many ways I’ve always considered myself a bit of an animal, as I crawl on all fours in dense riverside vegetation, like a dagga boy hiding from humans and other unwelcome creatures. Deep in the bush, sloshing through thick mud and Phragmites reeds, that’s where I am in my happy place, while stalking yellowfish of course. 

DAGGA BOY (pronounced dug-ga) refers to older buffalo bulls pushed out of the herd to form smaller bachelor herds or to live the solitary life. Dagga in this case refers to the mud they are often caked in. For the other “dagga boy”, check our Family Artius directibus. Genus Dagga boi. Species Brendonius boderickus. Common name “Bod”. 

“A dagga boy herd of two.”

This was exactly what it felt like when Ben Pellegrini and I headed deep into a relatively under-explored pocket of Africa to look for blue yellows on a recent mission. As a dagga boy herd of two, we trudged through mud, tall grass and forest thickets while sipping sweet water from a cool river carving through the Zambian ‘highlands’, channelling our inner animal instincts to stalk these relatively unknown fish. 

We were in the upper reaches of the Congo River system, a largely unspoiled place in a national park where signs of logging for charcoal and poaching of wild animals and fish were minimal compared to the landscape in adjacent tribal land. Nowadays there are few places left on Earth that are scantily populated by humans and even fewer that have that ancient feel to them. Apparently, some of these places, reminiscent of prehistoric times, are tucked away in the Old World, like the African forests of the Congo Basin. 

“While we might have considered ourselves 20% dagga boy on land, mpifu topped that with being at least 80% dagga boy in the water.”

After about a ten-hour drive in a 4×4 from the capital, Lusaka, Ben and I finally found ourselves stretching our limbs at the top of a mountain range in northern Zambia. We peered over a tropical forest that seemed endless, stretching to the horizon with foreign squawks of birds and the rush of water echoing against the cliff face below us. Our excitement was uncontainable, and we leapfrogged each other across the rocky mountain ridge to try and get the first glimpse of the river below us, but the tantalising source of the noise of the torrent was hidden by forest thickets towering above the flow.  

“I spend a lot of time in wild places but the unexpected and strange terrain suddenly made me feel very nervous and a tad uncomfortable.”

The landscape was so foreign to me that it felt like we had just descended upon Pandora, the planet in James Cameron’s Avatar. Flamboyant flowers and butterflies popped against the dark forest floor and every second plant I brushed past either had strange insects on them or poked me. I spend a lot of time in wild places but the unexpected and strange terrain suddenly made me feel very nervous and a tad uncomfortable. We were about to embark on a six-day float trip with local expedition leader George Bell covering approximately 40km of river in a gallery forest corridor. Besides a chance to come face to face with a real dagga boy (and leopard, lion, hippo or crocodile), the thought of a giant alien creature, like a mountain banshee descending upon us from the forest canopy at any second, didn’t seem far-fetched. 

We set up camp on top of the mountain and cracked a few cold beers to celebrate our arrival. The campfire conversation was energetic on the first evening and many thoughts about fly selection and techniques for blue yellows were shared. The first night, however, was agonisingly long. Even though we hit the sleeping bags late and felt pretty buggered from travelling, I really struggled to fall into a deep sleep. The buzz of the nightlife kept me awake while my mind wandered through the views of foreign-looking trees such as red mahogany, marula, quinine trees and raffia palms choking the river channel and potentially hiding many wild animals. 

“It was not the wild animals in the surrounding bush we needed to worry about, but rather the wild fish in the river.”

It was still dark when I woke up the next morning. We set to the necessary tasks of piecing together the raft, re-packing all our gear for the float trip and fly camps and, most importantly, setting up our fishing rods. With limited sunlight in the forest, we also wanted to make the most of the daylight hours to try and spot cruising adult yellowfish in the deeper runs and pools. In my experience, yellowfish are best targeted in clear water. 

Waterproof backpacks were stuffed with fly boxes, reels, warm clothing and snacks while we gulped down hot coffee and cooked oats with fresh apple pieces, a delicious breakfast à la George Bell. After clambering down the steep mountainside to get a better view of the river and an idea of what the water clarity was like, we stumbled upon crystal clear rivulets lined with bright green aquatic plants. The most abundant was a beautiful water fern giving a Devonian atmosphere to the aquatic world in front of us. 

These rivulets and the bubbling turquoise pools, formed by large rocky outcrops splitting the river into a series of cascades, were teeming with fish of all shapes and sizes. The plethora of fish in front of us had our beady eyes glinting and really made it feel like we had travelled back in time, to the “age of fishes”. Unshaven and on all fours, we crawled like a bunch of lost furries through the bushy islands and over the aquatic terrain to sneak up on pools to try and see a blue yellowfish. After all, that is what we had come so far for. 

The blue yellowfish

Blue yellowfish have been on my radar ever since Edward Truter caught some of these strange fish with his fish scientist friends while exploring the aquatic biodiversity of the Congo catchment in Zambia over the past two decades or so. What made them so special is that the scientists were not convinced that they represented the well-known and better described Congo yellowfish (Labeobarbus stappersii). In fact, the ichthyologists believed that the Zambian blue yellowfish could be genetically distinct, i.e., a new/undescribed species, and that they were also not the only “yellowfishes” living in these smaller, mysterious headwaters. 

My initial attempts to target these fish with Garth Wellman in 2019 failed miserably, mainly because of the lack of availability of the right craft in Lusaka to float and fly fish these rivers properly, and then Covid-19 came along and basically terminated the dream for several years. During this time I met Ben, while catching Natal scalies in the Tugela River with Jeff Tyser, and we learned that we had all been interested in these central African blue yellows and had done our homework independently to try and access waters in northern Zambia to catch these fish. 

“While some fish snagged us beyond rescue, forcing us to snap the tippet, others simply opened #2 Gamakatsu B10S hooks on that first unstoppable run.”

Immediately after the Covid lockdowns came to an end, strings of photos of colourful Zambian fish, including yellowfish, infiltrated my WhatsApp feed from my good friend Russell de la Harpe. He and George had been catching them in the upper reaches of the Kafue River from inflatable Flycraft that they had imported from the United States. These photos reignited the thought of the blue yellows and the possibility of successfully accessing remote areas where they occur with the Flycraft, the ideal platform for fly fishing. Logistics and costs were discussed and just like that dates were set for a trip to blue yellowfish country with George’s Rivers & Dust Safaris (www.riversanddust.com).

Edward’s biggest blue yellow, which featured in The Mission Issue 03 as part of a Lifer profile on Ed, was basically the catalyst that brought us together and transformed our dreams into a real mission. Sadly, the group of dreamers grew smaller closer to the time. In the end, it was only me and Ben.  

Mpifu/blue yellowfish, dagga boys of the river 

My fish senses drew me towards nymphing methods to successfully catch the blue yellows. I learned over many years targeting yellowfish that most, even our own very big largemouth yellowfish living in the Orange/Vaal system, would gladly accept, sometimes even prefer, a nymph imitation of sorts (including caddis larvae, mayfly nymphs, stonefly nymphs, dragonfly nymphs, etc. etc. etc.). Hours, amounting to days, were spent tying various nymph patterns and these were also the first flies I tied on when we finally started to fish. 

Read the rest of this story in The Mission Issue 47 (Sep/Oct 2024) below. It’s free.

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