Landed Two Golden Mahseer as the season starts in Himachal Pradesh

The last yoga group of the spring season departed on the 15th April, hopefully everyone left feeling happy, relaxed and well fed.

After contemplating my four and a half coming months of total freedom, decided to spend the first few days in the garden giving everything a much needed watering. Also started preparing all the vegetable beds for the new salad crop and planted lots of chilli and flower seeds.

This done it was time to dust off the fishing rods and head down to Mahseer Island with Tommy, to see if we could catch the evening meal. First cast and I landed a beautiful 800 gram Golden Mahseer, could not imagine a better start to the season. Half an hour later I hooked into another beauty and landed another Golden Mahseer of just over one and a half kilograms. Both fish were caught using a seven gram silver Toby.

Having caught enough to feed us all we headed back to Basunti and I prepared the fish. I marinated the Mahseer whole in a sauce consisting of olive oil, lime juice, soya sauce, garlic, ginger, fennel, lemon grass, chopped onion and tomato with some salt and black pepper. Placed the dish in the fridge for six hours before baking in a pre-heated oven for twenty minutes at 200 degrees Celsius. Four of us managed to eat over two kilograms of fish!

For the benefit of Alison (Alison L, as she points out), who joined us on Sheila Baker’s magical yoga retreat in March-April, new additions to birds spotted in the Basunti gardens include: Blue Capped Rock Thrush, Yellow Billed Blue Himalayan Magpie, Golden Oriole, Brahmini Starling and Pied Flycatcher.