ARNO MATTHEE: AFRICAN EXPLORATIONS

My first international guiding gig started like 1998, 1999, season on Alphonse Island.

So...

Not much in the line of saltwater fishing in South Africa that's really accessible or any good.

So Seychelles in its infancy, that fishery was amazing to see.

And then after that stint there, I wanted to explore further.

Go see Farquaad, Cozumelito, Astove, Providence, all those atolls out there.

I started a company called Fly Castaway.

We had huge seasons, sometimes chartering three boats at a time.

Yeah, sort of during that time, had the opportunity to figure out how to catch milkfish on fly and carried on guiding there up until the piracy hit us in 2009.

That kind of literally almost destroyed our business.

It was crazy.

I mean, we were running like 300 clients through the Seychelles a season.

and then the piracy came along and then luckily maybe a month or a couple of weeks after that i got a phone call from a guy who was a first mate on a boat that we used to charter in socials called the sea star and he called me and said look i'm captain of a boat in mauritius at 110 foot boat and would you like to go to St. Brandon's, and literally that saved our business because we could move a lot of the business across to Mauritius, and there wasn't that big a piracy threat.

It's just too far away from Somalia.

You get these visions of you at 14, getting your first fiberglass rod, and it seems like fishing's been in your blood from day one.

The yellowfish.

and all of that, you had a career in the middle of all this.

You were, if this is the correct term, a riot policeman.

Yeah, it wasn't really a career.

We had to do national service.

So you could either go to the army, To the police.

So I was drafted to the army and then they had all these shrinks that come and see us and said, no, I think you'll be a really good fit to go to the riot unit.

I ended up there, but so I was drafted across to the police and that was like a four year process.

like stint that we had to do.

Obviously more pay, we had some downtime to fish a little bit.