Pekan, March 8-9 2008

Dissapointed with the previous trip, we managed to book the boat again for the following weekend. Hopes were not too high after how the weather decided to take a hit on us the week before. We loaded up the gears n launched off just before sunrise while the weather is still kind.

The condition of the sea was good in the morning making it pleasureable to fish throughout the morning. As for the afternoon towards the evening, the waves and wind did pick up a little making it harder to stand steadily to fish.

However, the weather did manage to set us back again on the second day. As we were driving towards Pekan town, we were hit by small bursts of rain and the condition did not further improve while we were having our breakfast. As the rain started to cleared up abit, we made our way to the jetty and try to hope for the best of the weather. Upon our arrival at the jetty, we could see from our boatman's face that something is not good. True enough, the winds were strong.

We waited for an hour or so, hoping the winds would die down but it picked up strength instead. We were forced to throw in the towel for the day and we headed to the nearest coffeeshop for a round two breakfast instead :) Below are some of the pictures of our first day out.

Its gonna be a bright morning on our way outFirst hit of the morning, baby mac Darren's opening account with a 7kg mac The king of macs strikes his jackpot, 25 pounder this time

Giant Trevally on a smaller scale compared to the macs The popper chasing blacktip was finally landed in the morning Another trevally by DarrenOur total catch for the first and last day of fishing of what supposed to be a 2 day trip

Pekan, 2nd March 2008

I've got a call from a friend of mine one fine day, "Yo, manage to get a boat for Pekan on the 2nd March, you keen ?". I agreed since its fishing on a Sunday.

Anyway, bad news came in the day before our trip. I've been getting smses from Sharma and Tang in the morning before our trip that they were forced to wait at the jetty for the rain to stop. Then by noon, got another message from Sharma saying that the waves at the rivermouth are at the height of about 4 meters.

True enough, the following day, it was worse when we reached Pekan, the boatman has informed us that the waves were at 5 meters with strong winds. Once we've reached the rivermouth, we could see the white top waves dancing their way into the river mouth. We could see from the boatman's face, its gonna be a big challenge to get out there. As he was about to make a turning back, he noticed a gap in between the waves and sped all the way to it. After about 15 minutes, we managed to break through the waves, and made it out there. However, we only managed a few bites and no solid hookups with Joseph bagging only 2 fishes for the entire trip.

Joseph with his 1kg+ Coral Trout

The one and only ebek for the entire trip

Pulau Jarak 20/12/2007

2 months, grounded for exactly 2 months as there are no fishing trips to join, I finally couldn't take it anymore. After I've got down the phone with boatman Ah Chung of Sitiawan, I was frantically calling everyone i know of the dates that the boatman proposed. And it was on a Raya Haji holiday. So everyone agreed on a 1 day trip to Pulau Jarak.

Part of the the gears of the trip

2nd( 1st Fish photo N/A) Catch of the day by Darren on IMA RO 80gms

Followed by the barracuda on IMA RO 80gms

Albert's turn to hit a mac on IMA RO 120gm

Poseidon PSPJ 502 & Stella 5k opening accounts with EG Javelin 90

Followed by Ah Siang's power Angchor

Darren's IMA RO strikes again on a grouper

And again

Overall, this trip was just average, we were hit by heavy rain en`route to Pulau Jarak and we wasted quite some time waiting for the waves to calm down and rain to stop. By the time it did, we did not make it to the island itself but we could see it from a distance. Well, what can we expect from a 1 day trip :)

Paka Sept 16 catch report

6 hours on road, 3 hours on sea, just 30 minutes of andrenalin rush. Thats the best word to describe my shortest fishing trip ever. Starting off the journey from KL at about 12am, we reached Paka at 5am in time for breakfast. Got our stuff loaded on the boat at the jetty by 6am and we were good to go.

First destination was to the unjam to get some live bait for our `supposedly` tenggiri(spanish mackarel) hunting trip. Selar, kembung was showing up in very little numbers. Some of them was too big to be used as live bait. Suddenly, we saw a few boiling spots around the unjam. Our deckhand immediately took out his rolls of handlines and there we go, trolling around the unjam for the boiling bonitos(tongkol), cencaru for the next 3 hours on hand lines !! Trust me ...you wouldn't want to try holding a handline with 10-15 hooks attached to it, each hook with a bonito which are close to one kilo each :)

EK, pulling a full house load of bonitos on board ...notice a glove was used...my fingers were bruised too by the line peeling out of your hands when you're trying to bring them in

After that, we proceeded to drift for tenggiris. Unfortunately we've got a few bites but no solid hook ups. According to boatman, water was too clear but even when fluorocarbon leaders were used, it did not yield any positive results either :(

I started to jig when nothing seems to be working, looks like fishes there were not interested with the jigs as well. I've tried almost all the jigs i have from 50gm - 120gm but there's not even a nibble. Sea started to get choppy and i starting to get seasick, lied down or a nap and i did not realise how long i slept until i heard line peeling out from not one, but ALL 3 reels my friends were using. I immediately got up with a blurry face, with the grinning faces of my friends looking at me, i immediately casted my jig out to the school of Dorados. They were least interested in the jigs and they went after the fillet baits drifted into their way.

Feeling dizzy to change my rigs, my friend hooked up one and passed me the rod to fight while in the meantime, the tekong helped me to changed my rigs. Feeding frenzy lasted for about 15 minutes. Total chaos on the deck as we had double, triple, quad hookups and the dorados was jumping around our boat and had a good try to tangle up our lines. We were practically running around the deck trying to sort out our lines.After about 20 minutes or so, we managed to land 16 Dorados. Bad news hit us after all the andrenalin rush for the past 30 minutes. We ran out of ice as boatman only brought 2 packs of ice on board...ggrrrrrrr. We chose to get back to shore to save the dorados as our cooler box was all full as well. We had a short but great time, reached shore at about 3pm.

Fully filled cooler box of bonitos, cencaru, kembung.

Our taruh makan taruh makan catch. Lucky and unlucky for us to bump into the school of them and run out of ice in the same time.

So long for now