More species hunting fun on Okinawa: Part 3.

The first time Lillian and I visited Okinawa, I stupidly took the incorrect international driving permit with me (I now know there are three different ones), and we could not hire a car as a result. This limited our mobility and because of this I fished one particular spot close to our accommodation several times, two concrete piers near the South Steps Dive Site in Chatan. During those sessions, I’d caught a few different species there, and as we could park our hire car nearby, that’s where we headed to continue our first day’s fishing.

As you can see, it was a bit windy and looked like it could rain at any moment!

The railings around the two piers were quite badly rusted and in a generally poor condition when I fished on them two years ago, with some sections having been removed completely and replaced with scaffolding poles. When we arrived this time, the piers were both fenced off completely at the top, but there were people fishing on one of them, so we decided to climb around the side of the fencing to fish on the other one. Once we got down to the bottom, I realised that the condition of the railings had become even worse, becoming unsafe and this was no doubt why the two piers had been fenced off. Fishing behind one of the sturdier looking sections, both of us started catching a few fish, most of them were species that we hadn’t caught at the first spot, which was great.

Some of them I’d caught before, like this monogrammed monocle bream,..

…and this yellowtail devil. 

I also caught a few new species. The first was this bowtie damselfish, which was a beautiful deep blue colour.

I caught my first striped large-eye bream,..

…and then Ryan and I caught a few of these very colourful sixbar wrasse.

We both also caught our first ever Oriental butterflyfish.

Towards the end of the session, we caught quite a lot of Indo-Pacific sergeant and a couple of other sergeant species. The two I caught, weren’t new species for me and Ryan caught a third that I did not, that would have been a new species had I caught one.

We caught quite a few Indo Pacific sergeant.

Male Indo Pacific sergeant turn blue when they are breeding.

We both caught a few blackspot sergeant.

Ryan caught the only yellowtail sergeant of the trip, just before we called it a day.

So, our first day of species hunting on Okinawa had been a great success. Between the two of us, we’d managed to catch over thirty different species. In the evening, we visited a fishing tackle shop and then went out for some sushi. The next day, heavy rain was forecast, so we decided to head north for a drive to Nago. There, we wanted to fish for freshwater species in a small river, and maybe visit Kouri Island too if the rain wasn’t too heavy. 

Tight lines, Scott.