FIFTEEN boats and 42 fishermen (anglers) graced this year’s annual Murchison Falls Invitational Fishing Tournament (MFIFT) which ended on February 22nd with more kilograms of Nile perch caught compared from 2013. It was fanfare with a family of Bruce Martin and Paul Goldring fishing with their two daughters.
At the end of three days, the actual competition was won, in 1st place, by George Thomson with 48.8kg. The 2nd place went to Gavin Mourizen with 41.6kg and 3rd place to Leon Styne with 22.2kg.
The ‘junior competition’ was won by one of the Goldring twins (TBC) –while the ‘donkey award’ went to Steve Rodwell for not being able to fix his engine. And the ‘small fry award’ was won by Jaco Bestbier for a 3 inch fish, which scored his only points!
The first day of the competition garnered a total of 181 kg with the biggest catch being a 15 kg cat fish.
The second day on the river had saw lots of fish caught, but nothing of any great size. The day had total daily catch was 267.6kg and the biggest fish was a 25kg Nile Perch caught by Andy Lewis.
The leader at the end of the second day was Steve Hemsted (from Kenya) with a combined catch of 25.8kg and in 2nd place is Rob Jones from Jinja on 23.1kg.
The ‘junior competition’ was led by Amy Goldring who caught a 7.1kg catfish.
The last day yielded a total of 164 kg with the biggest fish caught being 17.3kg caught by Paul Goldring.
At this year’s competiton,8m shillings was raised for Paraa Primary school procure individual desks for pupils with 4m shillings to be spent on scholastic materials from McMillan including text books and teachers guidebooks. Sadolin pledged paint for the school to bring it to acceptable standards while any balance from the funds raised will be spent on research on biodiversity.
At the same function, gifts from Uganda Wildlife Authority were auctioned and bought by Dino Bianchi and Ignatius Rensburg raising a total of 1920 dollars which will also go towards acquiring more desks for Paraa Primary school.
The organisers of the tournament donated yet another brand new Yamaha motorcycle to UWA to help in its anti poaching activities.