Taimen.mn

Mongolian Triple Crown, article by Nathan Ward in This is Fly, Issue 18. Starts on page 101. “The cool thing about fishing in Mongolia is that any cast you make could be the cast that hooks you up with the biggest fish of your lifetime.”

Both Fish Mongolia and Sweetwater Travel are featured on National Geographic’s Hooked episode ‘Monster Fish of Mongolia’ with Zeb Hogan. “Aquatic ecologist Zeb Hogan continues his quest to find and protect the worlds largest freshwater fish in the frigid rivers of Mongolia. He will travel by plane, truck, and horseback to find the largest trout known as the Hucho taimen”

Here are links to two blog posts by adventure travel photographer and writer, Nathan Ward. Nathan has visited Mongolia on numerous occasions over the last 15 years, and in the summer of 2008 he visited Fish Mongolia’s camp on the Delger Muron, and took a trip to the Taiga hosted by the new Tsaatan co-op tourism initiative, the Tsaatan Community Visitor Centre.

Here are a selection of taimen fly patterns used by Mikhail Skopets in the Russian Far East. Misha is a professional fish biologist & enthusiastic fly-fisherman based out of Khabarosk. More fly patterns can be found on his website at www.xapuys.ru

The March 2009 edition of Fly Rod and Reel has an excellent article on Taimen fishing in Mongolia “Taimen in the Land of Khan” by Peter Fong. “If you’ve seen the pictures, then you might already be lost. The angler kneeling in bewildered devotion, smiling with an awkward joy, behind a fish so impossibly large that two hands provide an insufficient cradle. Because as soon as you can imagine it, the dream begins.”

This youtube video shows a Belgian angler landing a Taimen from the Shishged River in Northern Mongolia. The Taimen was released, but not before it had been dragged up the bank and rolled in the sand and silt. This video has generated a number of comments highly critical of the angler.

Taimen video clip on youtube by National Geographic. ” The taimen is the largest member of the salmonid family, which also includes trout and salmon. These fish are fierce predators that sometimes chase their prey in packs, a practice that earned them the nickname “river wolves.” They have gray-green heads with streamlined, reddish-brown bodies. And they can be enormous, with particularly large specimens reaching six feet (two meters) long.”

Scientists working in the Eg and Uur rivers in northern Mongolia in 2006 found this 5-foot-long (1.5-meter-long) taimen that had choked to death on a 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) taimen. The taimen, a voracious and cannibalistic predator, has earned the nickname “river wolf” because it hunts in packs.

National Geographic article on Taimen Conservation featuring Zeb Hogan. We had the pleasure of fishing with Zeb and Brant last fall on the Upper Uur while filming for Zeb’s mega-fish series on Nat Geo TV. “The gigantic fish is the world’s largest salmonid the family of fish that includes salmon and trout. The species can live for more than 50 years, but they grow slowly, not reaching maturity until seven to nine years of age”.

Video showing underwater footage of spawning taimen by Manu Esteve. Filmed at the Eg-Uur Taimen Science camp