Paul Torday: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Then the sheikh cast out his line, and a moment or two later so did the boss. I had to hand it to the boss; he looked like he’d been doing it all his life. The line went straight out and didn’t make much of a splash when it hit the water. It was typical of the man: everything came easily to him. If he’d been told he had to ski the next week or play in a water polo match, he’d have done it, and looked good doing it, as well.

Then I heard Fred shout, ‘Be careful! The water is rising! Keep an eye on it!’

The boss either didn’t hear, or didn’t want to hear. He had let his fly come round and was making his next cast. The rain was coming down like stair rods now, and the river looked as if it was almost boiling under the weight of water coming down out of the sky.

‘I think you should come out now!’ shouted Fred. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of water coming down!’

Even I could see that the water in the wadi was rising. I found I had unconsciously stepped back a couple of yards, higher up the bank. At the same moment Colin began to wade into the river, I suppose to help the sheikh out. I saw our security men looking at each other, wondering what to do.

There was a flash of lightning, or perhaps it was not lightning, but it made me turn my head and I saw the tribesman I had noticed earlier on the promontory, with his rifle raised to his shoulder. He had either just fired a shot, or was about to fire one. Had I heard a shot? The water coming down the river was beginning to roar now. One of the security people pulled a gun from under his jacket in a single fluid move, and I think he shot the tribesman. At any rate the man fell backwards off the rocky crag and disappeared from my sight. I don’t know who he had been intending to shoot. I think it must have been the sheikh, but I can’t be sure.

There was uproar and several more shots were fired by the Yemenis, I don’t know what at. I don’t think they had yet grasped what was going on. The crowd broke up, people scrambling up the bank to get away from the river and from the shooting. I found that I was several yards higher up the bank again, my heart thumping in my chest, staring down at the boss.

He had turned to look at the noise, but he wasn’t moving. I think he was smiling. I don’t think he had seen the tribesman either shooting or being shot, although he knew something had happened, because he had turned to look downstream.

I saw him look at the sheikh, who was bent over, supported by Colin, who was now at his side and struggling to keep his balance against the weight of water. Maybe the sheikh had been shot. I don’t know.

Behind the boss I saw a wall of white and brown water come round the corner of the canyon and surge down the wadi towards him. I could see, rather than hear, Fred still screaming to him to get out. Then Fred, too, turned and started to scramble towards safety, up the bank.

The boss was still smiling, I think. I was some distance away by then, but you can tell sometimes from a person’s posture that they are smiling. He was facing away from the wall of water coming towards him. He must have heard it. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t. They say you can get very absorbed fishing. At any rate, I like to think-I am as sure as I can be-that as he lifted his rod to make another cast, he was very happy. He was far away from politics, far away from wars, from journalists, from MPs, from generals, from civil servants. He was in a river and there were salmon running past his feet, and with the next cast I am sure he believed he would catch a fish.

Then the surge hit him. A boiling torrent of brown water, mud, rocks, palm fronds raced down the wadi with a noise like a train, and in a moment Colin, the sheikh and the boss instantly vanished without trace. The wave then powered on and disappeared round the next corner into the canyons far below.

One second the boss was standing there; the next he was gone. And I never saw him again. Or the sheikh. Or Colin McPherson. They never found their bodies.

That was what happened when we launched the Yemen salmon project, and the salmon ran in the Wadi Aleyn.

Dr Alfred Jones:

From a scientific perspective, the Yemen salmon project was a complete success.

I knew it was a success from the minute I looked down and saw the salmon entering the water flowing down the wadi. A few days ago they had been thrashing about in a huge cage in a sea loch on the west coast of Scotland, now they were wriggling down a concrete chute from a concrete basin high in the mountains of the Yemen.

It did not matter to them. The salmon came wriggling down into the wadi, and a few simply went with the current and disappeared downstream. But most of them turned upstream, heading against the flow, not knowing where they might be going, only knowing that they had to head upriver until they found a place to spawn. Their instincts told them what to do, just as I had hoped they would.

Most of the fish were silver, but a few were already coloured, an indication that the hen fish were ready to spawn the thousands of eggs they carried, and the cock fish ready to inject their milt and so fertilise the eggs. My eyes filled with tears as I thought of it all: here, at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, though thousands of miles from their home waters, the salmon were ready to do their duty.

As I watched their fins cutting through the water, I felt a sense of elation. And I remembered the sheikh’s words, that we would see a miracle, and I knew that was what I had just witnessed. I remembered Harriet telling me the sheikh would think the project had been a success if one single fish ran up the wadi. Now there were hundreds. One fresh fish was already netted and killed, inside my jacket. I had to somehow insert it onto the end of the prime minister’s line, to make sure he caught his fish.

Then I noticed the colour of the water changing, the sound of the river beginning to grow, the noise of the waters cascading down from the peaks far above becoming angrier and more threatening. The sky was darkening to a deep, inky black.

It was a plug. I should have anticipated it. Such things are not unknown on spate rivers, and that is essentially what the Wadi Aleyn is: a river that goes from almost dry to flash flood and back again in a few hours. Salmon running spate rivers learn to wait for the water. They smell the rain, they know a flood is coming, and then they surge upriver, meeting the torrent with impossible strength and courage, leaping the waves or hanging in the water at the sides of the river when the speed of the flow becomes too great even for them.

And in spate rivers sometimes you get a plug. The rain is too heavy to soak away into the ground. It runs straight off, and the run-off carries with it mud, dead trees, rocks, and if the debris should come to some constriction in the riverbed, then a temporary dam is formed. The water builds up behind the obstruction until the force is so great that the plug is breached, and then a wall of water goes surging through the breach and on down the river. You don’t want to be standing in the water when that happens.

And the rain was heavy. The summer rains in the Yemen are really just the tip of a vast system of monsoon rains which miss the rest of Arabia but brush the southern coast of Oman and the Yemen for a few weeks. In those few weeks the rain can fall with the force of a tropical storm, causing flash floods of just the sort we experienced that day in the Wadi Aleyn. I suppose I should have known, but I’m a fisheries scientist not a hydrologist, nor a meteorologist. Nevertheless, I still blame myself for not foreseeing it. Not one of our computer models predicted what happened.