Fishing places
Africa
From the Atlantic surf of Morocco and the Western Cape to the reef and current systems of the Indian Ocean coast.
Being listed here is not permission to fish.
Access, fishing rights, seasons, licences, local bylaws and permitted methods vary and can change. Check the current rules and permission for the specific water before fishing. FishingHQ describes what the ground is and names who holds the answer; it does not hold the answer itself, and it does not tell you where to go and catch a fish.
Find the authority for a jurisdiction · What FishingHQ does and does not cover
- 10 fishing regions and destinations
- 0 publicly documented places
Regions and destinations
Each of these is a full guide: what fishing there is like, what dominates, the water available, how the rules are structured and who administers them.
- East and West African fishingTwo coasts and the greatest lakes on earth — an artisanal fishery feeding tens of millions, a Rift Valley fish fauna found nowhere else, and a set of pressures that make this the continent where fisheries governance matters most.
- Lake Victoria and the Rift Valley lakesThe largest tropical lakes on earth, holding more freshwater fish species than anywhere else — and the site of the most consequential fish introduction ever made.
- Moroccan mountain and reservoir fresh waterTrout streams at altitude in the Atlas, a national system of large reservoirs holding introduced pike and black bass, endemic barbels in the rivers between them, and a hydrology in which the water is not always there.
- South AfricaTwo oceans meeting at a continental corner, with a cold productive Atlantic coast on one side and a warm Indian Ocean coast on the other, and a shore fishing culture built on both.
- Southern African fishingTwo oceans meeting at the bottom of a continent — one cold and upwelling-driven, one warm and tropical — with a shore-fishing culture that is among the strongest anywhere and a great inland river system behind it.
- The Agulhas CurrentOne of the fastest western boundary currents on earth, running warm tropical water down the African east coast and producing both the sardine run and one of the most dangerous seas in the world.
- The Egyptian Red Sea coastA desert coast with coral reef in swimming distance of the beach, no rivers at all, and more European visitors in the water than almost anywhere on earth — where the diving is documented exhaustively and the fishing is barely written about in English.
- The Moroccan Atlantic coastThe northern end of one of the four great upwelling systems on earth, producing an enormous sardine fishery, an octopus fishery of international weight, and a surf coast with almost no shelter.
- The West African coastA coast of surf beaches, lagoons and river deltas where one of the world's great canoe fisheries works water that upwelling makes extraordinarily productive — and where distant fleets have been fishing it for decades.
- The western Indian Ocean coastA warm reef and mangrove coast running from the Horn of Africa to the Mozambique Channel, where a monsoon-sailed dhow fishery is being joined by flats, reef and offshore angling.
FishingHQ does not yet hold granular place records for Africa. The regions above are the current coverage — the place tier began in Britain and Ireland and has so far reached continental Europe.