Authors: Robson Green
I have followed Jamie’s instructions not to shave whilst travelling and I have the beginnings of a beard. I can see my reflection in Peter’s sunglasses: it’s grey and ginger
and I am devastated. What throwback gene is this? There are no gingers in my family. I think about phoning my mum. Hang on a minute, the man from the Providence loan company – he was a
ginger! I start to dial but there’s no mobile phone signal out here.
We head to the hotel and drop our bags off. As always we’re on a tight schedule and need to crack on with filming shots of the landscape, culture and people to establish our setting. The
streets are lined with poverty and the banks guarded by ten armed guards with attack dogs. But what is most strange about this place is that everyone has red mouths and red teeth.
I discover that the red in the people’s mouths isn’t blood but dye from chewing ‘betel nut’, areca nuts wrapped in betel leaves with a sprinkle of crushed seashells,
which act as a lime alkaline to release the stimulant properties of the leaves. They produce a feeling of mild euphoria and alertness but the downside is everyone knows you’re ‘off your
nut’ because your mouth turns a vibrant shade of scarlet. I look at the men, women and children all chewing it – it’s like a national drug. I suppose it’s a bit like alcohol
in Britain – after all, red wine stains your lips and teeth.
Our hotel is a beautiful paradise retreat with a wooden reception area and thatched huts overlooking the ocean. The chambermaid is still preparing my room as we arrive and she flashes me a
crimson smile. She is blatantly ‘on the nut’ and is rather friendly, to say the least. I am not sure if she wants an extra tip but let’s just say I think she’s suffering
from desert disease – a bad case of wandering palms. Still, she’s only human. I’d want to paw me all over, too.
That evening we head to the bar. There is nothing quite like a cold beer after days of travelling. We are all in good spirits and clink our glasses, toasting to this ‘ends of the
earth’ experience. We dine on steamed Papuan black bass, perfectly cooked by the hotel chef. It’s the taste of things to come.
Papuan Black Bass
‘Pound for pound the black bass is the world’s toughest fish,’ says Riccard Reimann, my fishing guide and black bass guru.
He’s intelligent, at ease with himself and good-looking – we instantly have a lot in common. It’s early morning and we are at the Kulu River in search of this legendary game
fish. Indigenous to only this part of the world, the Papuan black bass is a prize fighter, explosive on the line, and has been known to snap many fishermen’s lines by the way it takes the
bait. I am coiled with anticipation. We stand on the edge of the crocodile-infested river and Riccard tells me that so far this year three guys have been taken from the banks while baiting their
hooks. They were never seen again. Well, bits of them were. The crocs here are exactly like the ones found in Australia and they look for routines before they attack. If patterns of behaviour are
the same, they remember them, then like serial killers they will watch and wait in the shadows before they strike. If there is a group, they will attack the smallest. I am a lot smaller than
Riccard! I look around me in panic but Peter is smaller than me and with his shiny swede has a lot more skin on display. I think I am safe.
We set off in a small boat with Riccard’s assistant, Chris, and I keep one eye on the vicious archosaurs as we drift along the slow-moving brackish water. We are using torpedo lures with
propellers to make disturbance on top of the water – creating a wake with small pops of the line. Riccard points to some tree roots in the river.
‘This is where the bass are hiding. They will be sitting deep in the snags or at the top. You have to get your lure as close as possible,’ he says in hushed tones.
‘So accuracy is an important factor today?’ I ask, casting straight into the trees.
‘Yes,’ he smiles.
I am snagged and I can’t get the hook off – it’s a terrible cast with no sense of distance or height. I am yanking and yanking, desperately trying to untangle the line. Craig
is filming, grinning.
‘Will you just pan off while I get my five-a-day?’
Jamie is loving my failure. As a director, he brings out the worst in me.
I am jet-lagged, freaked out about crocodiles and for some reason I can’t get ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ by the Fine Young Cannibals out of my head. I hum it over and over, still
trying to untangle my line, but it snaps and the lure is left dangling in the tree. There’s no way I can get it. It’s a twenty-pound leader attached to a forty-pound braid line –
an expensive mistake. Riccard is so patient: ‘Don’t worry. It happens all the time.’
He casts his line out and places the lure perfectly by a floating log. Wham! Riccard lifts his rod up and starts wrestling the fish.
‘As soon as he hits the lure he’s turning and it’s just like a steam train. If it’s a big one you just have to hold on,’ he says, reeling.
It’s only a four-pound black bass but it’s a massive fight for such a small fish. Many black bass come in at around fifteen to twenty pounds here, but several have been seen over
thirty pounds in size. I imagine it would be like hooking a charging herd of mammoths.
The black bass is a fine-looking fish with shimmering silver, pink and gold scales the size of shirt buttons, and a spiky dorsal fin. The Latin name is
Lutjanus goldiei
and it’s
actually part of the snapper family, which inhabits fresh and brackish water. The two canines on its upper jaw and smaller teeth below allow this fish to feed on whatever comes his way: small fish,
mammals, crabs, baby crocs . . . he’s not fussy. He is the biggest predator in this river, save the reptilian rippers.
After setting up again, I cast out my line. I need to be between three and six inches from the edge of the structure, in this case a fallen tree trunk.
Come on, Robson, don’t mess this
up.
I get vegetation again.
‘Can you please stop filming me doing stupid casts?’
Or maybe I could just stop doing stupid casts in the first place. I am annoying myself intensely. I want to become a troll on my own Twitter page. Jamie grins: ‘Just take a deep breath and
relax. Calm down,’ he says, knowing this will wind me up even more. Thankfully, I get the lure back this time and save Riccard £12. I cast again, this time three inches off my target.
It’s a cast that deserves a fish and I get one. ‘Hold on, Robson,’ says Riccard.
Just as he predicted the bass is fighting like a commuter train in full motion. And I lose it.
‘I did everything right, Riccard! I did everything you told me!’ God, I hate myself today. I want to swap bodies and be Riccard – or even Prada – but not me. I exhale
loudly. There is a way to fight a black bass and I put too much bloody tension on the reel – when the fish runs, you need to let the line go a little slacker and put just enough tension on,
but not too much. This comes with experience and, as usual, I’m learning the hard way. Riccard casts effortlessly with one hand. It’s beautiful to watch and he is so precise. I need two
hands and two minutes to get myself sorted; I’m all fingers and thumbs. Riccard’s in. The one thing you must do with a black bass is move it away from the structure as quickly as
possible because the fish wants to go back into his hiding place. In fact, as he attacks the lure, he is already turning for home.
‘They bolt so quickly,’ says Riccard. ‘He’s taken me into the snags.’
‘What do you do when he’s returned to his lair?’
‘Give a bit of slack but not a loose line, and watch him.’ He swims out but the line is caught about ten feet down. The fish can’t get off the hook and Riccard can’t
bring him in. It’s stalemate – someone has to go in and retrieve the fish.
‘In you go, Robson,’ says Jamie.
‘What about the crocodiles, Jamie?’
‘I can’t see any. It’s fine,’ he snorts.
‘They are stealth hunters – they are not saying “Here I am, over here!”’
‘Well, you’ve got a head start.’
Jamie would secretly love me to be attacked by crocodiles – to him it would be TV gold. I can imagine him shouting, ‘No! Don’t rescue him yet, don’t rescue him yet! Let
him have a little bite of your leg, Robson, just a nibble. You’ll get a BAFTA! Maybe an MBE! It’ll be worth it.’ I fold my arms. I’m not going anywhere. So Chris puts his
goggles on and dives in, holding his breath for nearly two minutes. He comes up and says the line is well and truly snagged and then suddenly he is yanked down. A nine-pound fish has just pulled a
170-pound man back into the water. He emerges victorious with the bass on a lip grip and passes it to Riccard. It’s an amazing fish: solid, healthy and powerful.
That evening we eat the two black bass Riccard caught, garnished with my vegetation. I need to up my game.
Good Head
The next day we are in Rabaul in East New Britain – well, what’s left of it after a twenty-foot blanket of ash buried the town in 1994. As with the World War
II military hardware in the forest, they haven’t quite got round to tidying up yet. The volcano erupted, the ash fell and everyone fled, and that’s how parts of the area have remained.
It’s a tropical Pompeii. Mount Tavurvur smoulders ominously in the background, a sinister reminder of the red-hot bubbling danger beneath. Tavurvur is part of a horse-shoe of volcanoes
– active and potentially deadly – surrounding an aquamarine bay. The water is beautiful and serene, like a lagoon, but it is in fact Rabaul Caldera – the eye of a supervolcano
– and if this baby blows, the town won’t be the only place in trouble. They will feel the effects in Newcastle. No wonder people are ‘on the nut’ here. It’s a case of
‘live for today, because tomorrow you could be covered in boiling hot lava’.
The topography is terrible news for Rabaul, bad news for the planet, but great news for fishermen. The area is alive with bill-fish and I am hoping to catch a Pacific blue marlin. It’s
been over two years since I caught my first marlin, an Atlantic blue, off the Azores. Today game fishing enthusiast and pervy lure maker John Lau is going to help me.
I meet him at his workshop, where he is busy working on a lathe. John’s lures are known in game fishing circles throughout the world. We shake hands and he presents me with a lure
he’s made especially. ‘It’s called a “good head”,’ he says with a twinkle. His other lures are the Linda Lovelace and his personal favourite, the Monica
Lure-insky. We walk down the private jetty to his gleaming white yacht, the
Stephanie
. After the saucy lures I can’t help wondering how Stephanie, whoever she is, got a whole boat
named after her. The mind boggles.
Soon we are powering through the waves and immediately we can see there are billfish feeding at every turn. There are sailfish circling a bait ball of rainbow runners, lashing into them just 100
yards from the boat. On the starboard side a marlin is tucking in to another shoal of bait fish. There is activity all around.
I tell John that I am changing the name of my lure to Marlon Brando.
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘Marlin Brando – geddit?’
‘No,’ he says, looking blank.
‘I’m gonna make that fish an offer it can’t refuse.’
He looks at me, bewildered. It wasn’t funny to start with and by the time I’ve explained it five times I want to stick an orange in my mouth, wind my head in electrical tape and jump
off the side. Maybe that’s the sort of stuff Stephanie was into? I want a boat named after me. I’m game.
We trawl through the feeding area with our lures but after thirty minutes we have no takers. There are tuna feeding as well, but none of them are bothered about Marlin Brando when they have the
real thing, and the heat is starting to become unbearable.
‘Let’s give them fresh bait,’ I say.
We send out Rapala lures for rainbow runners. The deckhand pulls them up with ease. After half an hour I finally catch one. We slowly trawl the live bait but after three hours we get nothing. A
tuna goes by, looks at our bait and turns away at the last minute. These billfish are well fed and ready for an afternoon nap. I tempt them like Mr Creosote: ‘Surely, Mr Marlin, you have room
for one more wafer-thin rainbow runner?’ Nope. They are positive.
I have never seen so many billfish in my life. We must have spotted about twenty-five in total, as well as porpoises, whales and dolphins all wading into the fray to enjoy a good old buffet.
John Lau points at the leaping dolphins: ‘Such beautiful creatures.’
‘Yes,’ I say, looking at Jamie. ‘But have you ever swum with them? There is a dark side to dolphins.’
‘Oh, you’re not still going on about the pink river dolphins?’ says Jamie. ‘So what, one nipped your leg and butted you in the chest.’
‘I have been doing some research, Jamie. Dolphins are rapists and are even into gang attacks – you look it up.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. And it’s the same with moles.’
‘Moles? What the fuck have moles got to do with anything?’
‘There’s a dark side to them, too. Moles are misogynists. Ask David Attenborough.’
‘Ah, it’s funny you should mention him. Do you like birdwatching? Because I’ve just signed you up for some this evening.’
We jump off the boat and thank John for an enjoyable day at sea. After a quick wash and brush-up it’s time for me to fall on the grenade and judge the annual Miss
Billfish Competition, a beauty pageant for game-fishing enthusiasts.
I loathe and despise Jamie as I’m really not feeling this event. I stand next to John, the event’s compère, curl my toes and fix a grin. There are about fifty people crammed
into a makeshift marquee with plastic chairs, a dodgy red carpet and a table where judges sit. I’m one of four. It’s thundering and lightning outside and the rain is cascading down.
Kids and dogs are running around, screaming and pissing on the carpet. It’s a shambles. John taps the microphone loudly and everyone has a mini heart attack.
‘Good evening’ – the feedback is excruciating – ‘tonight we have a movie star all the way from England. I would like to extend a huge welcome to Robson
Green.’