We set off from Marina Country Club, MCC, at around 830am. Our original intention was to catch some bait fish i.e. tambans, as bait though we already bought 1.5 kg of live prawns. We preferred to have more varieties for the fish to choose. So we stopped by the buoy just outside Punggol jetty to try catching some. However today was not the same as my previous kayak trip, there were no tambans. We only managed to catch one baby selar. In order not to be seen as six idiots on a boat parked near a buoy catching tambans, we decided to move on to our main objective.
After about 30 minutes of boat ride, we reached our first spot. It is a wreck at Eastern Bunker. At first when I was approaching the spot, I thought that gigantic container ship was anchored directly on top of it. Luckily it was still about 40 to 50 meters away. As I scanned around for the wreck using the sounder, another boat with all senior anglers arrived. They anchored straight away and started fishing. Using their boat as the marker, I tried to drift around them instead of anchoring.
During our first drift, we caught our first grouper! Talking about beginner's luck here. After we drifted pass our "marker", we made our second drift. And guess what, we caught another grouper! All these while, we didn't see the other boat caught any. Maybe drifting was more effective during that time. However we still decided to anchor to save fuel.
This was my first time trying to anchor a boat. Anglers who fish on boat before will know very well that positioning of the boat is very crucial for catching fish effectively. And how well the positioning of the boat depends on the skill and experience of the skipper. I got to consider three main factors, sea depth, wind and current before dropping the anchor. These three factors will result in sort of an equilibrium position of the boat. And this is not all, after the angler drop their lines into the water, the lines will also drift with the current. All these have to be taken into consideration to position the boat in such a way so that when the bait finally reaches the bottom, it will be at where the fish are waiting, usually hiding behind the wreck from the current.
Anyway basing more on instinct than anything else, I told my crew to drop off the anchor. After the anchor was down, the boat still continued to drift. This is normal as the current and wind would eventually decide its final equilibrium position. But the problem was, our boat seemed to be drifting on a collision course with our "marker". When we got too close for my comfort, I started the engines and told the poor anchor man to pull up the anchor. I was not quite sure what went wrong, but the anchor just got stuck.
At this moment, the MPA boat arrived to add on to my headache here. They announced through the loud speaker that we were not allowed to fish here and asked us to move off. The group of senior anglers moved off but before they did, one of them even shouted out to us, "Do you know how to anchor one or not?" Oops, looks like it was easy to spot a beginner. Now back to my tricky problem. On one hand, our anchor was stuck. On the other, the MPA boat was waiting for us to move off. We were going round and round in circles, while the MPA guys were getting impatient.
Then suddenly we realised that maybe the anchor rope got stuck at the propellers. I lifted up the outboard motors and true enough, it was entangled there. We promptly uncoiled the rope, lifted up the anchor and proceed to our next fishing spot.
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