The live bait shop did not have any big plastic bags for the 1.5kg of prawns I had purchased, and the shop owner gave me 3 small bags of 0.5kg each instead. I thought that since it was a short journey from Pasir Ris to Punggol, it should not be a problem. The first thing I did after parking my car at Punggol Marina was to check on the prawns and to my dismay, almost all of them were dead! Including the 5 milk fish which I wanted to try out for this trip!
Attempt to resurrect them by transferring them to the boat live bait well in the shortest possible time could only save a couple of stronger prawns and 2 milk fish. After breaking the bad news to the crew, we departed to one of the kelong off Ubin to purchase another batch of live prawns. Not only it was a waste of money, but lives sacrificed for nothing.
While I was still recovering from the loss, my worry came true. It started to rain and wind picked up speed. We had to stop fishing as the strong wind was causing the boat to drift too fast. I decided to go into an nearby lagoon formed by the reclaimed land of Tekong to seek shelter. The water depth was only 4m. We would have no chance to catch any fish there, so we moved out the moment the sky started to clear.
We continued to our fishing spots as planned. First spot outside of Changi Naval Base produced 2 groupers.
Since the weather was calm now, I decided to venture further out to Eastern Anchorage. After we reached the spot, wind started to pick up speed again. White caps appeared and sea water kept splashing on board soaking everyone and everything. We were wet and cold. Seeing this, I decided to turn back again towards shore. The journey back was tough, speed was kept low as the waves were just inches from washing into the boat. One wave did. I was getting a bit worried but I could not show it to the crew.
We managed to return to where we were outside the Naval Base safely. No fish was detected on the fish finder so we went further inland. I drove to a lesser traffic channel and let the boat drifted. We had our lunch and I need to get a breather to organise my fishing plans again.
After lunch and squeezing my clothes dried from the sea water, I decided to fish inland today. It turned out to be a good choice as I caught my first fish of the day.
And subsequently we managed to make up a bit for the lost time in the morning.
It was a day mostly of groupers as we fished around reefs and rocky formations. Of course there were a lot of sangkots too but no pain no gain.
Two of the anglers were seasick due to the morning trauma and did not perform that well. Luckily there was a temporary jetty near Tekong which they landed on while we continued our fishing nearby. We picked them up when the water became much calmer.
It was quite an adventurous day for us. Though the catch was not that good, I hope everyone of them had some fun somehow.
And a closed up shot of the catches as usual with a 1.5l bottle :)
nice catch despite losing so much time to bad weather !
ReplyDeleteluckily there was still some good weather for us to fish.
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