Species Hunting Adventures In Phuket: Part 5.

After stopping to get some lunch on the way, we arrived at the small pond, and I set about thrashing the water with some small plugs and paddletail lures mounted on small jigheads. After a while I did see a fish following my lure, and it had a wild slash at it just in front of me before speeding off, flashing its silver flank as it did so. I'm fairly sure it was a small tarpon, but obviously there's no way to be totally certain. Anyway, I carried on trying, covering most of the pond and trying a few different retrieve speeds and styles, all to no avail.

I didn't see any no fishing signs.

Having spent over an hour trying to catch my first tarpon, and having caught nothing at all, I decided to turn my attention to the multitude of fish that I could see between the edge of the pond and the floating pontoon I was standing on. Turning around and rigging up a split shot rig, I got comfortable and quickly caught three of the larger species that I could see, taking me over the one hundred species mark for the trip!

First to greedily gobble a piece of prawn was this Cantor's gudgeon.

Followed very quickly by this humpbacked cardinalfish.

From a submerged rock, I then tempted my first robust mangrove goby.

Seeing lots of tiny goby sitting on the rocky bottom, I switched over to a tanago hook and baited it up with a tiny piece of prawn. Lowering this down, after missing a couple of bites, I caught one of the diminutive fish, and swinging it up to hand, unhooked it and popped it into my micro species tank for a close up photo.

This tiny tank is an awesome addition to my species hunting kit. Inside it is my first ever black-spotted stubnose goby!

Fairly confident I'd caught all the mini and micro species behind me, that I could see anyway, and also hadn't caught already during the trip, I made a final effort to catch a tarpon. Despite my efforts, I was unsuccessful, sadly. By this point, it was fairly late in the afternoon, and there was one last spot that I wanted to fish, so off we went. About thirty minutes later, we arrived at Sarasin Bridge, parked the car and walked out onto it.

Sarasin Bridge connects Phuket to Phang Nga in southern Thailand. It's now for pedestrians only, having being replaced by a new road bridge that runs adjacent to it in 2011.

Not long after we arrived, the light was slowly beginning to fade and there wasn't too much current flowing underneath the bridge. Dropping a chunk of prawn to the bottom, I caught a fish straight away, but after that things were surprisingly slow. Eventually, once it was pretty dark, I caught a second fish.

This chocolate hind was an addition to the trip's total, but I've caught them before, again whilst in Singapore last year.

Another species added to the tally, this whitecheek monocle bream was also my first.

By the time darkness came, the current flowing under the bridge had picked up considerably, making fishing more difficult with the tackle I had with me. I did want to continue fishing closer to the start of the bridge to see if I could catch any nocturnal species, but it had been a long day, and we were both quite hungry, so I packed up, and we made the one-hour drive back south to Rawai, stopping for some very tasty smash burgers on the way. 

It would have been nice to end our time in Thailand with a traditional Thai meal, but this triple smash burger with bacon and cheese was so good!

Sadly, our in Thailand had come to an end, and despite not being able to fish on Rawai Landing Pier, I think I did reasonably well on the species hunting front. In the morning, we were flying back to Singapore, where we'd be staying for two nights before flying home again. We had a bit of sightseeing planned, but I was hopeful that I would be able to squeeze in two last fishing sessions before the adventure was over.

Tight lines, Scott.

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Species hunting adventures in Singapore: Day 1.

Last month I flew out to Singapore with two of my mates, Chris and Lee, for a week of sweating profusely in the country's ridiculous, highly humid climate whilst trying to do some fishing. Singapore is home to hundreds of different species, so I was very excited to see how many I could catch. 

After a long flight from Heathrow, where Chris and I almost missed our connection due to a delayed flight from Edinburgh and a ludicrously long wait at the baggage belts in domestic arrivals, which resulted in a mad dash from Terminal 5 to Terminal 2, just making the check in desk with a minute to spare, we arrived at our hotel located in the Geylang area at about 10:00 on Wednesday the 21st. Our taxi driver, on the way there from the airport, insisted that we knew fine well that Geylang was the location of a large red-light district, despite us telling him repeatedly that it was merely the most affordable accommodation we found, and we were there only to fish for a week! 

After checking in, having a badly needed shower and getting changed, we jumped in another taxi, and went fishing at a few spots along the South Marina Promenade. Chris and I fished with Angleworm and Isome on a drop shot rig, whilst Lee tried searching the water column with small metal jigs and soft plastics on jigheads. Of course, before going, I'd done some research into the most likely species we would encounter and sure enough some of the most common ones were the first ones we caught.

The south coast of Singapore on a hot, sticky day. As it turns out, that’s pretty normal weather for Singapore.

My first fish of the trip was this seagrass tuskfish. Tuskfish are a subgroup of the wrasse family. They have quite prominent tusk like teeth, although they're not visible in this photo.

This was soon followed by lots of anchor tuskfish, they would turn out to be the much more commonly caught of the two species.

The third species I caught was this diamond wrasse, another very common species in shallow rocky areas. Also known as the bubblefin wrasse. 

After catching quite a few of the three wrasse species above, Chris caught a couple of small Spanish Flag snapper and I then caught this small dory snapper.

Chris and I were fishing close to the bottom. Lee searched the water column and wasn't catching many fish. Over several trips with Lee I’ve gotten used to this, he knows what he enjoys and through perseverance usually catches some pretty cool fish,..

...like this fringe eyed flathead.

After moving around a few times, we ended up hiding in the shade of some trees. We were all still sweating a lot and were also probably starting to feel a bit of jet lag kicking in. We soldiered on for a while longer though and were rewarded with a few more fish.

These pink ear emperor were pretty common.

I caught a solitary notchfin threadfin bream.

As well as another small snapper, this one is a yellowfin snapper.

I also caught my first grouper species of the trip when this small chocolate hind took my piece of angleworm.

By the early evening, the action had slowed down, and we had run out of bottled water. We had probably lost more water through perspiration than we had drank, so we desperately needed to rehydrate, so we packed up and headed back to the hotel. The air conditioning in our rooms was excellent thankfully and after another refreshing cold shower we headed out in the evening to explore the area, wandering around, eating some tasty food and washing it down with a few ice cold beers. It hadn’t been a bad start to our trip on the species hunting front, although I had managed to get sunburned on my left calf. I must have missed the area when applying my sun cream. Oops!

Tight lines, Scott.

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