Saturday, December 27, 2008

Yan Trip - Dec 20-21

I came back from Yan at KL last Sunday evening with my friend Derrick and another 2 fishing buddies. We only manage to fish at the tuas (local name of FAD) for the 1st day, and decided with support from the boatman, that we should cancel the 2nd day plan. We suffered from strong wind from north-east and fish was not biting. Details as follows ...

We pushed off from KL about 4:00pm and heading Penang. It was lucky for us that the traffic at Penang bridge was not as bad as we imagine when we reach the toll at 7 15pm. At 9pm, as Derrick arranged, we met fellow Roslan from Penang which will be also be fishing at the following day. With Roslan guidance we had our dinner at Northern part of Penang.

We started our journey to Yan on 4 15am, Dec 20. After our breakfast and collection of kembong bait as booked by Roslan, the boat left the fishing port at about 7 15am. The sea breeze during then was mild, but wind picked up after we were on the sea for about 30 mins. The boatman took a new "tuas" with him and intended to be "planted" in that trip. It was new experience for me to witness how a tuas looked like. Basically it is a long rope with top part of it tied to 3 length of bamboo, where the intermediate are tied with nipah leafs, with interval of about 1.5m. The bottom was a well-ring alike concrete structure and tied with lots of new leafs. I did not asked the boatman if different leafs would make any difference for the fish-attracting purpose though. How he positioned the tuas was, he brought his boat to front of the tuas and dropped those bamboo into the sea and let the boat drifted by the wind for a while, and sink the concrete approximately at the spot where other bamboos located.

New experience it was, but we lost about an hour of time on the sea, watching small size dorado playing with they prey chasing at the top part of the tuas.

I remember it was about 9am when we were able to sink our jigs into the sea and started working on it. There was another boat from Yan too was long sided on the same tuas as we did. The boatman tied his boat at the bamboo and as what we observed, the bait fishes and predators were active at the front area. I had a talk with Derrick about where we actually should be fishing and Derrick tried to request for same, but the boatman responded saying wind was strong and the anchor would not able to hold the boat at such condition.

Later we saw the other boat started hauling dorado, and none of them is doing jigging. The boatman assistant tried to cast dead kembong around but there was no taker.

I have prepared 2 types of feather lure with me for this trip. The first feather lure was tied by Nick the famous fly fishing guy from Tacklebox Subang Jaya. I tied a wire right in front of it with a weight added to increase the castability. I thought the soft feather from some birds would make the lure seems "swimming freely and cheerfully" and probably mackerel in Yan would like to try how it tastes like. Photo below is how the lure looks like.




The result? I jig-pause-jig-jig-jig-jig-paaaause-jig, changed from short to long pause, fast to slow twitch, long and short twitch, you could not say I was not hardworking enough then. The best attraction I successfully made was couple of times where a school of dorado with size of approximately 2ft followed the lure till about 6ft from the boat and puuuffff they made a smartass U-turn, comically showing me a middle finger when they did that.

The 2nd feather lure was bought by Derrick when he was in Penang tackle shop, and we put wire+hook to make it ready for mackerel nice clean teeth, I thought I was smarter but ... I tried this lure at later stage of our fishing, there was no dorado nor mackerel followed this lure to my sight but perhaps the waters during that was not conducive for fish bites. At a glance, this feather lure "swimming" action was not bad. The 4 nos. of longer feather seems soft and played lively when you twitch em.

At the time I try to look for the lure to snap a photo, I could not find in my luggage. I called Derrick and the other 2 friends if it was accidentally packed in their bag but the answers were negative. Looks like I have to leave the photo empty here.

While we were jigging on our boat, the boat near to ours was producing result. With live bait they got from sabiki and drift it out, they managed to haul a tenggiri at approximately 11am. From the distance I estimated that tenggiri would be a 6kg-ish. I thought that was not a bad catch, and Derrick started his effort to jig for bait fish at front part of the boat too but register no selar or kembong.

It was about noon then we drift our first live kembong with balloon. Meanwhile we tried pintail on top of our jigging and maintain the effort. Strong wind picked up around 2pm, coupled with the no bite condition, we decided to call it off for that day and heading to Yan's port.

We stopped at Pulau Song Song on our way and the boatman longsided his boat behind the wind, together with many other fishing boats. I could see anglers doing swimming, casting for squids or simply relaxing, and we end up doing easy casting with low expecation at that area too.

We returned at port at approximately 5pm, and we exchanged weather condition and the low bite rate with other anglers. The boatman suggested we make another trip to Yan on March where the wind is expected to subdue. From the conversation then, I understand max number of tenggiri they could haul per day at correct day is 60+ per boat. "That was not bad..." I was so thought. The boatman that supposed to take us out at the following day suggested us to retire for second day too as making it happen would be "wasting money". We obliged and make a tentative fishing dates with him next year.

Later, the group meet up with the other team where Roslan was and we had our dinner at a restaurant nearby.

We drove to Penang island later and convert our fishing trip to a Penang Food Hunt at the evening. I appreciate Derrick effort to drive us around in and out and to good food corners in Penang. The 2nd day we spend our day in "kakilai" paypond and got some fun with farmed siakap (barramundi) there. What I wish to write down here about kakilai pond is the very friendly and nice owners Ah Tong and his wife. At that time Ah Tong was telling kaki-lai pay pond will be re-open on January 1st of 2009 with new fee.

About the tenggiri in Yan, my next visit would need the following;

1) murky water

2) spinner with multiple hooks for kembong. Jigging would be nice, sure, but come to think about number of jig one need to contribute for a reasonable catch, you will think like what I think.

3) easy wind

4) dead fresh kembong, 15 to 20 per anglers

That ends my Yan's trip report of Dec 2008.