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.
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| 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!
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| First to greedily gobble a piece of prawn was this Cantor's gudgeon. |
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| Followed very quickly by this humpbacked cardinalfish. |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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.
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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.
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This chocolate hind was an addition to the trip's total, but I've caught them before, again whilst in Singapore last year.
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Another species added to the tally, this whitecheek monocle bream was also my first.
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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.
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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!
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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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