Log VI - Kayak

With modern technology like GPS and fish-finder, we are able to convert a kayak into an effective fishing vessel too. Sometimes can comparable to a boat or ship, provided you have strong arms that is.

The main purpose for this trip was not for the fishing actually but for harvesting mussels. Fishing was a bonus. Since we had already spent so much effort waking up early on a public holiday and pumping up the kayak until my back ached, we might as well make it more worthwhile.

After a slight delay to our plans due to drizzling in the morning, we excitedly launched our kayak at Punggol jetty. It has been 3 years since we last kayak out to harvest some home grown mussels.

It didn't take long before we filled our pails with mussels. Extracting them was fast, it was the clearing of the stubborn barnacles that grown on them which was time consuming. As I was chiseling away the barnacles, my friends were trying to get some bait fish for later use. By the time I was done with the mussels which also worsened my back ache, our bait wells were still empty. We continued on to our bonus stage anyway without any baits.

With the help of our GPS, we paddled towards a nearby sunken kelong. When we reached the area, we were greeted by schools of bait fish playing near the surface of the water. We managed to fill our bait wells with tambans in no time.

 

After scanning the area  with our echo sounder, we decided to anchor at a spot where there was an underwater structure and the fish finder was registering a lot of fishes. We threw in our self designed and self made anchor and started fishing.

 

That was when we could take a rest and take some photos with the fishing spot as our background. The schools of fish just kept surfacing and swimming all around us. I thought we would have a high chance of getting their predator, but I suppose it was not their meal time yet that day. We tried live tamban and even live anchovies which we caught over there, but the only fish we caught was a Sergeant Major.

 

After a while, another boat joined us and started fishing there as well. The anglers on board claimed that there are many sea bass in this area but we would have to be patient. Still we decided to call it a day as we were going to continue on to our last and best part of our trip, and that was to BBQ our harvest.

 

The mussels tasted simply great! They were very fresh and sweet. It was a tiring but very fun day. And now I have another spot to go to when I need to catch some bait fish, and also to prove what the anglers on the boat told us is right.

Land Log I

"The longer your lure can swim in the water the higher your chance." I said to Wei Lun as I whipped my Yozuri Metallic Sardine jig some 50m away into the dark waters in front. I was not sure what lure my friend was using, but that definitely couldn't fly far.

We moved to another spot after a few casts and by this time, Wei Lun had also changed to using a lumo jig to cover more distance. Out of the quiet darkness, we heard some commotion on the water surface to our left. By angler's instinct, we cast in that direction as we observed closely the surface for another splash that will increase our heart rate.

"Plak", a jig flew aimlessly out and eventually sank into the deep. Wei Lun's line had a wind knot and it broke off as he cast. He retreated to the nearest lamp post and started tying his FG knot under the dim light. At this time, the rate of the splashes increased and suddenly I got a strike on my jig! The struggle at the other end lasted only a split second before the hook was loose again.

I cast again and it was another strike! "Strike again!" I exclaimed towards the poor anxious angler trying to tie his FG knot while a frenzy was boiling right in front of him. But the fish threw hook again this time. Adrenalin was rushing by now, I must get one out this frenzy or I would not be able to sleep tonight. As my senses sharpened to notice every surface action that could appear even at the corner of my eye, I felt a very strong take on my jig. This time much stronger than any of the previous ones. Immediately I set hook for another two times and fish was on!

It felt like a big one, something that I did not expect to get here. After fighting the fish for some time while praying hard that it would not dive under the jetty which would cut my line, I managed to see what it was.

 

I pulled it all the way to the shore and landed it. I think I just caught the top of the food chain in that area. Lucky the small fishes residing there and lucky me.

Log V

When I last checked the weather forecast, it was thundery showers over the Northern and Eastern part of Singapore in the early morning. But the sky was clear when I reached Punggol Marina. After my previous trip with bad weather, I realized that when you are out at sea, you are really at the mercy of the weather especially if you are driving a small boat. Weather forecast has hence become one of the most important part in planning my boat trip.

We went to search for bait fish i.e. tamban, as planned at the buoys just outside of the marina. There were many baby selars but tamban was hard to come by. We caught about close to 20 selars but only 2 or 3 tambans before we decided to move on to our first spot.

First spot was near the rocks just in front of the Changi Board Walk. The terrain was good and the fish finder registered positive results. But we only caught a leather jacket here.

Not to mention that it was foul hooked. Since our target today was to try the wrecks outside Changi Naval Base, we didn't stay long here. Along the way, we passed by a patch of coral reefs that delayed us a bit more with this.

If you have noticed, the sky was not looking that promising already, and the grouper was throwing out its breakfast during photo taking. We actually wanted to stay longer as the fish was biting but we felt the temperature was dropping fast and gusts of cool wind were blowing. To avoid being caught in the coming storm, we moved further out to another patch of corals, and up came another grouper.

It seemed like today will be a great day with the only problem of dark clouds constantly lurking behind us and we had to keep out-running them. As usual, I would always give the reefs beside Changi Naval Base a go before moving out to our wreck destination. And this was the turning point of our whole trip.

We thought we were driving further away from the dark clouds behind us, only to discover there was another big cluster of storm clouds in front of us. The wind picked up speed fast and the next thing I know, I was only able to drive the boat at about 2-3 knots to avoid the 1 meter high waves from gushing into the boat.

I had to accept the fact that by now, we would not be able to go out to the wrecks today due to weather again. And my next immediate task was to bring us back to safety as the waves were getting very daunting. The boat was riding the waves on the way back as the wind was behind us. I hope my crew would still have the appetite for lunch after this roller coaster ride.

The wind was much weaker when we reached Tekong area. I suppose everyone was relieved after the bumpy ride and my shirt was all soaked. We moved from reefs to rocks, to drop offs, to everywhere I could think of. The fish finder was registering excellent results but they were not biting. I was not sure what was the reason as usually when the fish finder show something like this, there would be takes. But for today, this was not the case. Was it because of the tidal current, the moon phase, or just after the heavy rain? I'm definitely going to find out after this blog.

For the rest of the day, we only managed to catch this.

He caught this after he had just lost a big one when it threw hook. I'm sure that the memory of the lost big one will last him for a while.

These was our hard work for the whole day. At least it was enough for dinner which I'm contented and happy.

Log IV - First Southern Islands Excursion

The time was 7:05 am, I was supposed to meet my crew at 7:30am at Changi SAF Yacht Club, and there I was frantically chipping small pieces of ice to separate the ice cubes bags inside a 7-11 store with a scissors which I had borrowed from the cashier. Water had poured over the bags previously and solidified again making them into one giant ice cube. By the time I was done, it was already 7:20am when I started my journey to the yacht club.

My phone rang while I was driving there and I was updated with two news. The good news was that I did not have to rush anymore. The bad news was that the boat was still not in the water yet due to some miscommunications. After waiting for the club personnel to launch the boat, we left the club at around 9am. A bit later than schedule.

Our first stop was to pump diesel which gave us a wild goose chase. We drove from one bunker to another looking for one which had spare diesel for us. We managed to get one after three tries. That made it another 1 hour delayed.

I understood that my crew was eager to do some fishing already by then, so I went to a nearby spot to start what we had came for. First drop and we caught a grunter immediately weighing 1.5kg. Wow what a good start I thought.

 

Even the fish was not cooperative when taking this photo and showed me its backside.

After that we went to Sister's Island, St. John's Island and Semakau. All three places yielded no results. To make the situation worse, the boat was traveling at an extremely safe speed of maximum 9 knots. Not because I wanted it to, but the engine was temperamental today. It only decided to give our speed a boost to 20 knots on our way back.

We stopped by outside Changi Naval Base hoping to have our final shot. And we finally gave in to our fate that we were supposed to catch only one fish today. We headed back to the club and this posed another challenge for me when I was at the berthing area. The berth lanes were much narrower compared to Punggol Marina. Furthermore, I was driving a much bigger boat this time. And the fact that there were luxury yacht parking nearby did not help.

With the help of my crew, I managed to berth the boat without causing any damage to the surroundings. To me it was an achievement already.

Though the catch today is the worst so far, I have learnt a lot of things from the Captain who accompanied me on this trip and given me many pointers on how to handle the boat, and most importantly what are the safety precautions that a Captain of the boat has to take when we are out at sea.

Anyway luckily we still had one fish for our dinner and this was it. The best part of the day.

The dinner was good. No one complained about the lousy catch, instead we were discussing on how to improve next time and was already planning for our next trip. And there is this one most important thing that I have learnt from this trip, that is, I'm very lucky and blessed to have such a good team of fishing crew with me.

Log III

"Let's try going left this time!" I shouted as my anchor man tightened the anchor rope and I steered the rudder to the left. The boat moved a little and started to go in a circle with the anchor line pointing towards the circle center. My anchor was stuck at one of the wrecks that we were fishing at, and we had spent about 30 minutes trying to retrieve it but to no avail.

I had tried in all directions and my two anchor man were having sore arm muscles from all the pulling and releasing. In the end, we had to make the ultimate decision of cutting off the rope so that we could be freed. This had given me a phobia of anchoring a boat but also a valuable lesson learned. One of the most difficult task in driving a boat, especially for fishing, is to be able to anchor it so that the final position of where your bait would land is where the fishes gather.

This is a skill that comes with experience as it takes into consideration of the wind and current speed and direction. This is made more difficult as there are no reference point in the middle of the sea to see which direction you are going. Everything is based on GPS.

Luckily the weather was excellent, with clouds sheltering us off from the sun all day. But the fishing was bad. The current was stagnant for most of the day and only picked up speed in the late afternoon. We were glad that we were still able to put something onto our dinner table at the end of the day.

For the whole morning, we only managed to catch one gu hood at one of the wrecks.

After that, we moved inland as wind started to pick up and it was drizzling. Seeing that the sky was very grey a distance away made my decision more obvious.

When we were near Tekong we caught a golden snapper.

Bites were slow and we moved further in, and we caught another juvenile golden snapper at Changi area.

I managed to land a queen fish when I saw some surface action at one of the spots. I took away the sinker and cast my live prawn over.Within less than a minute, it was taken by a small queen fish. Subsequently another grouper was landed.

Though the catch was not that good, there were a lot of lessons learned and new fishing friends found. Hope that for those anglers who did not catch any, had also enjoyed their day out at sea breathing in the scent of sea salt. Something that I always enjoy.

Log II - The dinner

It is our usual practice to pick a couple of fish for dinner after the trip. This time we picked a grouper, of course as there were not many varieties to choose from, and the second was the deep sea bass.

We went to Changi Village to try out their culinary skills at cooking fresh fish. For the grouper, we ordered the sweet and sour, and this was what we got.

 

I'm not sure what's the name of this cooking method but it is definitely not suitable for fresh fish. The grouper was over fried until it was quite tough and there was not much flesh left. The whole fish seemed to have shrunk by a lot and this cooking method was not what we ordered.

As for the deep sea bass, we ordered the garlic steam... I think.

Can't see much of the sea bass though as it was covered by tons of garlic. This definitely tasted much better than the grouper, but I was not sure whether to give credit to the chef or the inherent good eating quality of this sea bass species.

Anyway I will have doubts bringing our fish back to that restaurant again and sadly, my search for a good restaurant which can cook our catch continues....

Log II

Hearing the thunder and seeing flashes of lightning in the wee hours of the morning made me worried whether we could go out for fishing at day break. By the time I made my way to Pasir Ris Pond to buy live prawns for the trip, there was no rain but the sky was gloomy.

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 :)