On day two we decided to head to Bedok Jetty, a very popular fishing venue on the south coast of Singapore. Before heading there we visited a supermarket to stock up on plenty of water, some fruit and a packet of frozen raw prawns for Chris and I to use as bait. Lee would be fishing exclusively with lures again.
The jetty was very busy with both anglers and other people out walking or cycling. It proved to be a good choice of venue for us and we racked up quite a few species as the day went on.
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| Bedok Jetty. A must visit venue in Singapore for species hunting anglers. |
I started the day how I’d ended the previous one, by catching a juvenile grouper. As the morning progressed Chris and I steadily added more species to our tallies, fishing small pieces of prawn on small hooks close to the bottom. Lee fished with metal jigs most of the morning as he wanted to catch a queenfish, a species that is targeted frequently by the locals. There were a lot of tiny bait fish around. Every now and then they’d get hit from below, so Lee was hopeful it was his target species that were harassing them.
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My first fish of the day was this sixbar grouper.
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| After a few diamond wrasse I caught this butterfly whiptail. |
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Chris caught this long tail tripodfish. How cool! I wanted to catch one.
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I caught a monogrammed monocle bream,
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| …a herring scad… |
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| …and my first pearly-spotted wrasse of the trip. |
Whilst Chris and I were steadily catching fish, Lee was jigging away with various metals and after a few knocks his effort was eventually rewarded with a fish in the shape of a greater lizardfish.
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| Not what Lee was hoping for, but he was off the mark at least. |
After a few hours, a rod in a holder on the railings just along from us started bouncing away. We shouted over to the angler who owned it, who had wandered off, to let him know that he had a fish on. After a short fight and with the aid of another angler’s net he landed a nice queenfish. Seeing this, Chris and I set up heavy lure rods and joined Lee to do a bit of jigging for a while. After about an hour with not even a touch though, I switched back to fishing small pieces of prawn on my Rock Rover again! Chris soon joined me and we both caught a few fanbellied filefish amongst other species we’d already had.
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| The fanbellied filefish! Such an awesome fish! |
Lee was still jigging away, trying to get his lures out near some bait balls further out. I don’t think he was quite able to reach them though although closer in he hooked something that turned out to be a wolf herring, a rather bizarre fish that has the delicate body and scales of a herring and a cavernous mouth full of nasty long teeth.
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| Lee’s wolf herring. What a weird fish. |
Into the early afternoon Chris and I continued to catch a reasonable number of fish. Now and then the various wrasse species would be beaten to our bait and if we were lucky we’d catch a new species. There are several sardinella species around Bedok Jetty and some local anglers were jigging
sabiki to catch them. I switched to a set of sabiki myself to try and catch some but had no
luck. The locals were very proficient at catching them, but I couldn’t
figure out exactly what they were doing to catch so many. Later in the session I did catch one on a small piece of prawn though!
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| Chris caught a few of these rib bar cardinalfish before I finally got one too. |
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My prawn caught goldstripe sardinella.
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| Switching to fishing on the bottom with a running ledger, I was hoping to catch some shrimpgoby. Before I caught any though it produced this freckled goatfish. |
Mid afternoon there were a few flashes of lightning, and several seconds later, the sound of thunder broke the relative quiet of the jetty. Looking to the south west, dark clouds were drifting over the multitude of container ships waiting to get into port. Was the Singapore weather about to go from hot and very sweaty to hot and very wet? We would soon find out!
Tight lines, Scott.
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