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 :)

Favourite Fishing Bag

This bag is something I will not go without on my fishing trips. It has two main components. The top portion for storing the fishing accessories, and the bottom portion which is compartmentalized to store reels separately. The beauty of it is that the top and bottom portion can be separated, which I find it very useful.

Usually after you have reached your fishing destination, you will usually prepare your fishing setup. Once the setups are up, there is no need for the reel storage anymore. And in this case, it is the bottom portion of the bag. So basically, this bag offers me the convenience of carrying all my fishing gears and accessories in one big bag, and after that it can be reduced to just the smaller top portion for me to do fishing without taking too much space on deck.

The top and bottom are attached together by two front buckles and a zip at the back, and the problem with anything that is detachable is always at the joint. The back zip was torn due to wear and tear and it could not be joined together anymore. I was using an elastic cable to tie the two portions together for my past few trips until I could not stand the hassle.

I started to look around for people who could repair this bag for me. I started by asking the shop owner who sold me this bag and he had totally no idea how to go about repairing it. Without getting any assistance from the seller, I had to search around myself. After a few fruitless trips to so called bag repair shops, I managed to find someone whose shop is in Toa Payoh. He was confident in repairing this bag for me, but it came with a hefty price tag though.

He quoted me $110 for the repair and told me it would take about two weeks as the repair had to be done in a factory. Since I like this bag so much, I gave him $110 without hesitation.

It only took three days before I received a SMS from the shop that my bag was ready for collection. And he also told me that it only cost $90 to repair instead of $110. I was in fact quite impressed with his honesty. Even without the $20 difference refund, I would also be one happy satisfied customer, but he chose to give me back the money. And because of this, I highly recommend this shop to people who need to repair their bags. By the way, this shop offers shoe repair and key making service too.

If this world has more people like him, it will be a much beautiful place to live in.

This is the contact for the bag repair shop:

Daniel Flash
Blk 177 Toa Payoh Central
#01-120
Singapore 310177
Tel: 6353 8316

Opening hours:
11:00am - 9:00pm (closed on Tuesdays)

Observation Alpha 2 - Pekan

The weather for the second day was excellent. It was sunny with some clouds to serve as shade once a while. Maybe it was due to the bad catch yesterday, the young captain's father decided to bring us today instead. He is specialised in fishing for parrot fish and when I boarded the boat, I saw 2 plastic cartons full of baby mud crabs inside. I felt that we were in better hands instantly with the Captain prepared everything beforehand. He also bought some kambong from the nearby market as bait.

The parrot fish spots were much nearer than yesterday's. We didn't spend much time on travelling before we could wet our lines. As mentioned by the old captain that it is very easy for parrot fish to burst your line off by using the sharp coral edges. We experienced what he said shortly at the first spot. Parrot fish won the first round. The whole stretch of sea is covered by patches of coral reefs and we moved from one to another. Sometimes we won the battle, and sometimes we lost. At the end of the day, it was 5 wins for the parrot fish and 3 for us. It is a matter of life and death to parrots if they lost and the results showed how tough they were.

When sun was going to set, we went to a nearby unjam to try our luck and something rare happened. In fact it was the first time I encountered this. A barracuda about 30cm long was caught on a small 20g jig. And as it was fighting for it's life, it was bitten by a cobia! The hook on the barracuda managed to hook onto the cobia as well. All these happened near the surface of the crystal clear sea and we could see the actions taking place. Can I say that this cobia was caught on 20g jig?

This drama was the last act of the day, and we wrapped up our trip with excellent delicious cobia sashimi processed in my favourite way during dinner.

Observation Alpha 1 - Pekan

Though I had been to numerous fishing trips on a boat, I had not actually observed in details how a captain steered his boat, parked at fishing spots and planned his route. So this time round on my Pekan trip, I was more on observation mode rather than thinking what fish I would get at the next spot.

First day was bad as the rain started from early morning till late afternoon. We had to tied ourselves at one of the unjam at a slightly lighter rain area to wait for the dark clouds to pass before proceeding to our destination. Worse thing was, the rain came with lightning. All of us did not dare to hold onto our rods to fish while waiting. In the end, I pulled the line out of my reel and started hand lining for squids with my lure. Since we were at an unjam, and all my reels are spooled with braided line, I suppose that was the most logical thing to do at that point of time because even when there was a squid at the end of the line, the pull would not be able to cut my finger.

Took photo of this as it was my first squid caught on hand line.

We realised that the rain was not going to stop after some time, so we decided to proceed to our destination though it was still drizzling. When we reached, the sun finally came out. The terrain here was amazing. It was a plateau shaped like a horse shoe with the plateau at around 11 meters depth. The center of the horse shoe drops to 25m. I caught my first GT on popper at Pekan here.

But I was a bit puzzled as all the areas that we drifted, was everywhere on the plateau except the sunken center portion of the horse shoe. I thought that would be the most productive place where the fish can hide from the current? Too bad I was not the captain.

To be continued...