Notes on this blog

Welcome to my blog, which I hope you will enjoy reading. My blog articles fall under different topics covering the many niches that I have knowledge, experience and expertise in. The latest article will show up here but you can also check on the right hand-side under categories. Select the category that interests you and if you enjoy the articles or have any comments or questions please leave a comment or drop me a line Contact us

Firstly, who am I? My name is Simon Hemphill from Shimoni, Kenya where my family have lived since 1962. You can find out more about me here About Us but I have also added a few additional snippets here.

Big game fishing Kenya

Having grown up in paradise always surrounded by great sport fishermen and women who visited the family fishing club, Pemba Channel Fishing Club and fished with my father, Pat there was no shortage of great stories. As a young boy I would soak up all these stories often re-enacting them with my toy boats in the garden. Later, after I had returned from my studies abroad I would skipper one of the three boats and also run the club bar in the evenings.

Once we had sold the fishing club and begun operating afresh under Sea Adventures Ltd, and more recently under Fishing Shimoni, I was skippering my very own boat, Kamara and later Kamara II. I also took over from my father, Pat Hemphill as the chairman of the Kenya Association of Sea Anglers in 2000.

Having attained a PhD in "The ecology and exploitation of yellowfin tuna, Thunnus albacores in the Pemba Channel, Kenya" under the tutelage of Professor Tony Pitcher through the University of North Wales, Bangor I was appointed a board member to the Kenya Marine & Fisheries Research Institute for a period of 6 years.

Newsletters

Here you can find regular newsletters on the current Shimoni sport fishing season but you can also locate older articles under Archives on the right. Please feel free to leave a comment.

Fishing stories

From time to time I shall be writing short stories about marlin fishing from the ages, all of which will be true stories. Names of people will be changed to protect their identities but the overall story will be accurate.

The science of fishing

Ever since I returned from university in 1981 I began keeping a diary of events that occurred at sea, which usually involved making entries every hour when the radio call took place. Later, once I was running my own boat the entries became even more detailed. My passion for marlin fishing and especially using lures has led me to record great detail of every fish that was raised. 

All of this detail is being input into 5 separate databases because the number of variables recorded is so wide. Using these databases we can finally ask questions, such as:

• What effect does moon phase have on marlin catches?
• Does the tide have an influence on the time of day that marlin feed?
• Do marlin see colours and do they have a favourite colour?
• Are you more likely to catch a marlin when it's rough or calm?
• When a marlin is sighted tailing what are the probabilities of catching it?

And, there are so many more questions for which we can finally seek answers to using this incredible data set. We are also able to test the effectiveness of different positions within the spread and monitor our overall hook-up rates.

​From time to time I may also write on general fisheries topics from my local area.

Maritime training

Since 2010 I have also been involved in maritime training primarily through the Indian Ocean Maritime Training Centre where I am still the chief instructor for the Mombasa branch. Broadly speaking I teach people how to drive boats responsibly, concentrating largely on small power boats. But, I am also an instructor in other disciplines such as sea survival, radar and VHF radio.

My experiences have taken me to some beautiful parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and even to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Stories will concentrate on the places and waterways rather than on the companies for whom I was training.