Species hunting adventures in Singapore: Day 6.

On the penultimate day of our trip, we got a taxi out past Changi Airport and caught the first ferry from Changi Point over to Pulau Ubin, an island off the north east coast of the mainland. Our main target species for the day would be barramundi, although personally I would be targeting any species that we encountered. 

After arriving on Pulau Ubin, we headed west into the interior, making our way towards Jelutong Bridge, a well known spot to target barramundi over low water. On the way there the road crossed over a pipe that ran into a small concrete ditch on the left hand side of the road. The ditch was about a meter wide and was heavily stained a rusty orange colour. Despite the fact it didn't look very habitable, I spotted some small fish in it and quickly set up my Rock Rover. A bit of prawn on a split shot rig was dropped in, I quickly caught a few fish, and we were soon hiking again to what was supposed to be the first fishing spot!

Cantor's gudgeon was the first fish I caught from the rusty ditch.

It was followed by a few super aggressive knight goby.

Just before we left the ditch I caught a small Mayan cichlid.

The tide was out when we arrived at Jelutong Bridge, and much to my delight there were lots of mudskipper sitting out on the exposed mud! I quickly set about catching some of them. Some species were skittish and skipped away when I dropped a bit of prawn near them. Others eagerly skipped over and ate it with a ravenous appetite. Swinging them in, the first few I thought were hooked obviously weren’t, spitting the bait out before skipping off merrily back down to their holes in the mud. It was very frustrating! Chris then managed to successfully catch one which made me even more determined, so I decided to tweak my presentation slightly, tying on a slightly bigger hook, so I had more hook point exposed. When a mudskipper took the bait into its mouth I struck just a little bit harder too. This did the trick, my hook sets were much better and I quickly landed a few smaller mudskipper. There seemed to be two species that were keen on prawn and I caught them both.

My first ever species of mudskipper was the barred mudskipper.

I also caught some of these yellowspotted mudskipper.

Lee then pointed out a huge mudskipper down near the edge of the water, so I cast a piece of prawn over in its vicinity. The brute headed directly towards it, ate it straight away and I struck firmly, setting the hook. The fish "fought" pretty hard, thrashing about on the ground, but I managed to pull it up the muddy embankment. I was so excited, but when I stooped down to lift it up to unhook it, the fish thrashed about wildly and managed to unhooked itself. The sight of me trying to grab it as it made a thrashy, skippy escape must have been pretty hilarious, but it was so fast I just couldn’t grab it, and it made good its escape, entering the water and swimming rapidly along the surface, off into the mangroves, out of sight. I had a scout around but couldn’t see any more giant mudskipper so turned my attention to fishing for barramundi with Chris and Lee. After a while thrashing the water with various small hard lures, I decided to target a couple of other species that I could see swimming around in the current near the base of the bridge. The first was a species of halfbeak. There were lots of them around, and they were very easy to catch as they were all competing for the tiny baits I dropped in. Next, I targeted some small striped fish with yellow tails. Getting through the halfbeak was difficult, but eventually I managed to catch one. 

The water was full of these stripe-nosed halfbeak. Strange little fish with the oddest of mouths. The long beak is actually their bottom jaw. Their top jaw is a small flap just in front of their eyes, like a little trap door.

The other fish turned out to be banded archerfish. This family of fish have a large, upturned mouth that they use to spit water at insects to try and knock them from overhanging branches into the water so that they can eat them. How amazing is that?!

After a while there had been no sign of any barramundi, so we decided to head further west to Puaka Bridge to try there. Shortly after we arrived, Chris came and told me he had spotted a giant mudskipper and very generously showed me where it was and let me try to catch it, which luckily I managed to do almost straight away. Learning from my previous error, the fish was quickly popped into a net before being unhooked. Once I did remove the hook, it was actually pretty placid, so I was able to get a few photos before releasing it. I was over the moon with this capture. 

My first giant mudskipper! Quite a handful but, believe it or not, much smaller than the one that outsmarted me!

He was actually pretty chilled out once unhooked!

Lee, who had gone off through some trees to the right of the bridge, had been focusing on catching barramundi the whole day, so I went over to see how he was getting on. He’d seen a couple of them, but hadn’t had any luck getting them to take any of his lures. They just didn't seem to be in the mood. He had also been photographing a small monitor lizard that he had befriended. It kept appearing, eating some ants and then slowly skulking off again.

Lee’s new pal. 

He then pointed out a needlefish to me that was lazily basking in the margin nearby, so I went back to the bridge and grabbed my rod. A piece of freelined prawn was dropped in, the fish slowly edged forward until its toothy beak was alongside it, before it awkwardly ate it the way needlefish do.

My first spottail needlefish. Another new species added to my tally.

So the day was proving very productive species wise, even if the main target on Pulau Ubin hadn’t shown any interest in our attempts to trick it with various fish shaped bits of plastic. As the tide continued to flood into the mangroves, more and more archerfish began to show up. Lee stubbornly stuck to targeting barramundi, but Chris and I decided to have some fun freelining chunks of prawn and caught dozens of archerfish. Eventually I caught a bigger one that didn't look quite the same. It turned out to be a different species. 

In amongst all the banded archerfish I caught this solitary spotted archerfish.

Chris had lots of fun catching archerfish too. 

Lee even managed to get in on the archerfish action, catching one on a top water plug. 

It was soon time to make the hike back to the pier where we'd catch the ferry back to the mainland. Just before we left, some anglers turned up with live prawns to fish them under floats for barramundi. Maybe that would have been a more productive method. We didn’t really have time to hang around to find out though, unless we wanted to spend the night or pay for a very expensive boat charter!

Tight lines, Scott.

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