Tales from an African Paddler

Lake Malawi - July 2018

 

Nick Haan and I returned to travel the length of Lake Malawi, the last in my series of paddling the mega African Great Lakes. Nick's third mega lake with me and I couldn't ask for a more tried and tested partner. Lake Malawi has been paddled before and the scenery and stories are very inviting. We opted for the less traveled eastern shore, starting in the south, using the seasonal SE trade winds to aid us north, from Malawi waters into Mozambique and on into Tanzania - 605kms.

 

Malawi was  fantastic and pushed us to our limits. We in turn pushed our kit to the limits. The kayak punched above its weight, in hind sight we should have taken two singles or gone for the full reinforced expedition model, which also allows more carrying capacity. But we adapted and were not going to be held back.

 

The east coast proved to be as wild and beautiful as we hoped. The lake folk very hospitable and we never felt unsafe from a human factor, quite the opposite. We planned to capture this period when there was a predictable SE wind, we made good use of a hand-held pop-out sail when conditions were good. The downside of this season is that we went through some rough conditions. Quite often we were the only vessel plying the big swells and the Lake of Stars (named after the lamps of fishermen) often had no stars as the night fishermen sat out the weather. It took a few days to get our sea legs and adjust to the new and fully loaded vessel. Not having a splash deck in the hybrid sit-on kayak often meant water stayed in the foot wells and lap more than it could be drained out; at least for me at the back. We got into a good rhythm, pushing about 40-45kms a day, invariably finding some paradise strip of beach to camp on. 

 

As we came into the final leg we had the misfortune of meeting the awesome but unbeachable Livingstone Mountain Range just as a storm rolled in. Out of comms with anyone as we paddled into this remote corner, we had no way of knowing there was a massive storm front about to hit us. It started one afternoon on day 16. We rode the growing swells until we found a nook to get behind and sheltered on a beach in a small fishing camp. The next morning started reasonably calm and we set off, passing the point of no return as we rounded the peninsular and entered a stretch of steep mountain side that plunged into the lake as far as the eye could see, the Livingstone Range. A few hours in and miles off shore we were met with rapidly escalating winds and growing swell. The sky darkened as thunderstorms moved across from Malawi and clouded the peaks of the Livingstone Mountains. Sensing the worsening conditions we pointed toward the shore and for hours we surfed and braced our way until it started to feel more like a ski run than a kayak trip. We quickly realized there was nowhere to land, waves pounded straight into the steep mountainside. To say it was the biggest water I’ve paddled in is no exaggeration. We periodically took breaks to hang our feet over the edge and hydrate and would watch with awe as these steep twenty foot swells rolled toward us like the side of a double story house. We capsized 4 times just trying to navigate these swells, the 5th and last capsize was when we made the best of a bad situation and cartwheeled into a steep and stone-lined beach. The kayak fractured across its middle - I don't know how Nick and I didn't do the same! We spent two days on the side of the mountain in a remote village and did our best repairs with what little kit we had or could get our hands on. We also waited for the waters to calm. In the end, short of a proper fiberglass repair, no amount of patch work was going to keep the vessel together in those conditions. We then had the difficult predicament of how the hell we'd get out of there, we were a days hike over the steep mountain range to the nearest village that had a motorbike that could use a path to get us to the nearest town that had a road where we could wait for a bus. None of the local fisherman were using the lake, we later learnt the ferry had also been grounded that week. We eventually paid a brave skipper to ferry us with a 30hp boat to our point of pickup, a 3 hr ride we did at dusk with the kayak strapped on. So we hobbled into our final port, the kit and team bruised but united. Not the finish we planned but we were very grateful to have made the journey up the length of the remote eastern coastline and experienced the lake in all its beauty and awe inspiring strength.

 

The Lake

Lake Malawi, also named Lake Nyasa by Livingstone after an astronomer he admired, (he also called it Lake of Stars after the fishing boat lights he saw at night, and Lake of Storms after the unpredictable storms that blew across the water) is the ninth largest lake in the world, Africa’s third largest and second deepest, by volume it’s the fourth largest, behind Baikal, Tanganyika and Superior. Much like the other Rift Valley lakes, L. Malawi is longer (580kms/360mi) than it is wide (75kms/47mi), which is why we paddled the length. It borders three countries, the west coast is Malawi territory and is more accessible and populated, the east coast includes Mozambique and Tanzania and is very remote. The major inflow is the Ruhuhu river whose delta we’ll cross in Tanzania and the major outflow is the Shire River in the south, flowing into the mighty Zambezi on its way to the Indian Ocean. 

 

Stuff in the water

Famous for its freshwater cichlids, the lake has the highest diversity of freshwater fish species in the world (about 1,000). About 1.5 million local inhabitants depend on them for food, mainly three species, chambo, sardines and catfish. Unfortunately, the same people helped reduce fish stocks by 90% over the last 20 years (30,000 MT/yr to 2,000MT/yr)! And somewhat of a mixed blessing for us, they’ve also hammered the croc and hippo populations, now mostly found in the adjoining rivers and deltas, especially the Shire River where they apparently pay back the local fisherman with devastating effect. Other than that there’s the occasional hotspots for bilharzia, malaria, tsetse fly and, like Lake Victoria, we also came across numerous bug columns, black fly/midges that get into towering tornadoes and sweep across the lake. Water clarity is excellent in the lake, the 700m/2,300ft deep lake has no current between layers, so disturbance is limited to wind surf and river deposits. 

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