Eat your lips out, Rex Hunt

Here's me after an epic battle with a 5.5kg (13 pound) tiger fish on the mighty Zambezi River.

We motored out of the decadently-luxurious Sausage Tree Camp (thanks to my very good friends at www.classicsafaricompany.com.au ) on the Zambian side of the river and tied up in the lee of a small island near the Zimbabwean shore.

While we're on the shameless-plug bandwagon, the location was pretty close to where a plane crash lands in my second book, Zambezi (available from all good books stores and www.tonypark.net ).

Using ox tongue (as gross as it sounds) for bait I landed this pescatorial predator after about 20 minutes of casting into the current, followed by 10 minutes of fish-wrestling. A bachelor group of three elephants grazed about 50 metres away as my pommie mate, Bruce, and I angled and our respective wives, Jenny and Nicola tried hard to look interested over the rims of their gin and tonics and wines.

Bruce landed a prehistoric-looking monster of a vundu (cat fish) a few minutes later.

We let our fish go, in true Rexy style (it's catch and release there as we were within the waters of Zambia's Lower Zambezi National Park), though we forgo the traditional kiss. Bruce's Vundu was way too ugly (slimy with whiskers), while my tiger had teeth big enough to rip your bloody lips off.