More species hunting adventures on Okinawa: Part 5.

On day three we decided to spend the morning in Naha wandering around some of its covered shopping streets. On the way there, we stopped off to check out a couple of potential bridge fishing spots that we could make use of if the rain didn’t let up, but neither looked particularly promising. After leaving the covered shopping arcade briefly to treat ourselves to a tasty Spam and omlette onigiri, the heavens unloaded, exposing all the leaks in the roof. After dodging them, the puddles they created and wandering in and out of various shops for an hour or so, the rain went off for a brief period. Luckily, just as we got back to roughly where we’d started, so we hastily returned to the open air car park where we’d left the hire car. From Naha, we headed southeast to spend a couple of hours at Okinawa World, a theme park featuring local nature, crafts, a snake sake brewery and a large underground cave.

With millions of stalactites and stalagmites, Gyokusendo is considered East Asia's most beautiful limestone cave. At an impressive 5km long, about 1km of that open to the public. It was reasonably dry inside too!

As well as a tropical fruit garden and various crafts like pottery and glassblowing on display, the park is also home to a Habushu brewery, where they make snake sake. A visit to such a park usually ends in the gift shop, but Okinawa World had a gift shop after each attraction, which we felt was a little bit much.

Habushu is believed to have medicinal and aphrodisiac properties. We didn't try any, but on reflection I wish I had.

Leaving the park, it was still overcast, but it wasn't raining. To the east there were a few areas of blue sky visible, so we drove in that direction, ending up at Tosoe Fishing Port, another venue where we could fish right next to the car. The fishing there was reasonably good for the short period before the clouds returned, and before long it was raining heavily once more. During this short session, it was my turn to repeatedly get snagged, lose rigs, and waste valuable fishing time retying them. As a consequence, Ryan caught a lot more fish at this spot than I did and several species that I did not too. 

I caught this redbellied yellowtail fusilier. 

Ryan caught this ochre-striped cardinalfish and was blown away by its incredibly deep blue eyes.

He also caught a solitary whitsaddle goatfish,..

…a solitary freshwater demoiselle,..

...and a brown damselfish. I'd later discover that this species, belonging to the Pomacentrus genus, is found around the eastern and southern coast of Okinawa and has not yet been studied and formally identified by marine biologists.

I really struggled at this venue, but after catching a few dottyback, I added a second species to our trip tally when I caught this half-barred cardinalfish.

While I focused on fishing at close range down the port’s walls, Ryan decided to have a few casts further out with slightly bigger baits. Towards the end of the session, this paid off when he caught a couple of common ponyfish. Shortly afterward he caught these, it started raining heavily, so we quickly packed up and headed off before we got too wet.

This small palm sized specimen was followed,..

…by this much bigger one!

Raining heavily the rest of the day, we visited a CoCoICHI for a tasty curry in the evening and checked the forecast for the remaining two days in Okinawa. Thankfully it had changed from non-stop heavy rain and there were a couple of dry spells that we could perhaps try to take advantage of. We’d caught about fifty species on Okinawa during our first three days, but we wanted to catch even more!

Tight lines, Scott.