Hey Guys,
I managed to get down south to my friends resort last week for a few days, the purpose of the trip was to fix up an abandoned 44" cat and tow it back to the mainland. A bit of spearing was planned in between and some beers, spicy food and catching up too.
I have been spearing this spot for over ten years now, it used to be full of pretty good fish, once in a while i would see grouper to big to shoot with the guns use at this spot. They were so few and far between that i gave up taking the 140 and going trophy hunting after about 10 dives. These were not monsters but big at about 75kg.
It wasn’t unusual to land 15kg cobia, 20kg Cuda and Milkfish up to 20kg too. unfortunately things change, spots gets discovered and then they get popular and then they become part of the tourist trap, we move on and find virgin grounds and we get followed and so on.... Thailand is a pretty small county and with 62,000,000 people and a HUGE tourism industry there are not many spot X's left.
Today its rare to spear anything over 15kg at this site, the big grouper are long gone, either caught by rod and line fisherman or lurking in the depths, i hope they’re lurking somewhere, watching me, learning, waiting.... but its wishful thinking......
The first day we arrived on the island it was time to catch up with the locals and take a look at the catamaran, i had mixed feelings about it...... until i saw it! She is a beauty, 44" of bliss, O.K both hulls were badly damaged, she had been stripped down to the shell pretty much, but what was left was awesome. I knew straight away that with about 25,000 U.S.D we will have her sea worthy and also looking and feeling better than new.
Labor is dirt cheap here, and if you have friends in a particular industry its almost free, you do each other favours and pay for parts etc. I have a friend that does interiors of boats, a friend that owns a boat yard and luckily a friend who has a tug boat for the trip back to the mainland. We tied up 20 x 44 gallon drums to the cat and at high tide towed her to another beach where we waited for the tug boat, this was a day away, so the next day was spearing day.
that evening i honestly planned on being in bed by 8pm, getting a really good sleep and being in the water with my torch just before sun up. i would use my torch to navigate through the shallows and be on the outer reef, 4m to 20m, just as the sun was popping up........ finally at 1:00am i made it to my bed. Rice whiskey, spicy food, singha beer, tales of fish turned into exaggerated stories which turned into all out lies. we were in tears at some of the stories we were telling each other.... then the bottle was empty and we knew we were in trouble come sun rise......
I think i rolled out of bed at 10.00, i was the first up. i grabbed a big bottle of water, cooked an omelet and got ready.... i was in the water at 10:30, throwing up in my snorkel but pushing on. i got nothing in the first hour, saw some ok fish but i couldn’t face swimming all the way down there.... i was hoping g one might swim up to me and save me the hassle but it never happened. I swam back to my float and smashed a litre of water, then tied my float up to a mooring bouy on the outer reef and used my water bottle as a float..... much lighter, much easier, man i must have been hung over....
At about 12:30 my mate rocks up in the boat with some fresh fruit, cold water and a big smile...
Got anything? he asks
I just shake my head, relieved to see the boat
I sat in the shade for a short while and had a gut full of fresh fruit, it was just what i needed after about 20 minutes i felt spot on. i guess i needed the sugar. I jumped back in and disconnected the float line as my mate loves diving with a float line and i hate them.
I worked the deeper reef while he worked the shallows for grouper and jacks.
It was good vis, about 20m and water temp was about 27c but cooler below 15m.
As mentioned there is not much in the way of big fish but the conditions make it worth while. Lots of turtles, beautiful corals, eagle rays, blacktips and if your very lucky the odd bullshark. Most of my dives were dropping to 15m or so and either working the reef slowly or just doing an agashon. I will often dive below a cave or bommie with deep crevices and crawl up the reef to look inside. The grouper and mangrove jacks seem to feel more comfortable when they are looking down at you. If there is nothing in a cave i will often go up for a breather, then swim down and sit it out in the cave for a few dives, this often brings in the mangrove jacks, i got 2 that afternoon using this method.
There were very few grouper around, the ones i saw were down deep and didn’t hang about, they were straight in the reef and watching from a little spy hole somewhere i would never find them. If i was feeling 100% then hole hunting with the torch could have produced some better fish, but i didn’t feel like pulling 10kg of grouper out of the reef at 20m that day, in fact i knew it wasn’t going to happen.
After a few hours i ended up with 2 mangrove jacks, 3 grouper, one mauri sea perch, 2 sweetlips, one coral trout, a golden trevally, 2 blotched cod, and a few crays. I asked my mate if he wanted to gut and scale the fish over a nice lump in the deeper water with me in the hope of bringing in a Spanish or cobia but he was feeling like i was in the morning, he only got 2 fish which is really unusual for him. we opted to swim back to shore and do it there as the boat boy had taken off ages ago.
We were swimming back to shore in about 8m of water when i saw a nice size goatfish feeding in the shallows in about 4m of water, i dove down and very slowly creeped my way up the reef towards him, he couldn’t see me due to the mess he was making in the sand. I lined him up and just took a last glance around to make sure nothing better and come around to watch the feeding goatfish...... sure enough sitting in between two bommies side on to me was a barracuda, it was the biggest fish i had seen all day other than a milkfish that shot off first thing in the morning. i used the stirred up sand as cover and crept around the bommie to my left, i crept up over the bommie and sure enough he was facing exactly as when i left. I was now on his tail and he was facing away from me, cause it was so shallow i had t pull myself over the bommie and hit him before i surfaced, finning to keep myself down would have spooked him for sure. I managed to get close enough for the shot just as he turned to check me out, i took the shot before he swam off and it was high. I put the shaft through his shoulder and he took off, pretty good run to for a little fella. he took a good 20m of line off my paxman reel and went for deeper water. After the first run he didn’t put up much of a fight, i didn’t hit any organs and i knew if i swam down to knife him now he probably would take off again. My mate rocked up to see what it was, he was hoping for a cobia, and seeing it was a cuda he put a 6.6m shaft though its head and it was all over.
There were High fives and whoops all round, i didn’t even know why i was so excited, it wasnt a big fish, it wasn’t a tasty fish and it wasn’t a hard fish to shoot, but it felt great. I think its just because we were feeling so rough that this bit of a fight together on one fish made it worthwhile.
The cuda went about 15kg, the rest were all under 5kg.
Its great that sometimes we don’t have to travel to the ends of the earth or spear the biggest of fish to have a cracking time, that’s the beauty of our sport.... its all about who your with not so much what you shoot.
The fish here are very skittish and very hard to approach in Thailand, when i first speared in Western Australia i was shocked at the fish there, you can swim right up to them, i found the same to be true in other countries as well. Thailand really is a test of your patience and skill and all for pretty small fish.
But its worth it.
Rusty
bummer! I had visions of flying Downunder to go stay on a newly purpose built floating fish slaying palace