Species hunting adventures in Singapore: Day 2 continued.

Before we travelled to Singapore we were slightly concerned about the potential for us to get a proper soaking. Whilst the climate there is hot and humid, it can also be very wet too, only for relatively short periods usually, but sometimes these can be heavy downpours. 

Rain on the way?

It looked likely that the sweat might get rinsed from our clothes, or we’d have to leave the jetty and retreat to a shelter on the coast at the start of the jetty, but as the dark clouds approached luckily they began to clear and the sun kept shining, so we carried on fishing. Chris caught a dark fish with pale stripes that I thought was a striped eel catfish, a species with venomous spines that can deliver a nasty sting. “Don’t touch that!” I shouted over to him. After he put the fish down, so I could go over to get a better look at it, I realised that it was in fact a remora! These are the long, streamlined fish that hitch a ride on larger fish as they swim along. Had something large just passed under the jetty? Probably!

I'd discover later that Chris’s remora was a live sharksucker. What an awesome capture!

The sucker on the back of its head. Amazing!

Chris was over the moon to catch it and is still occasionally reminding me he had done so. I was, ever so slightly, jealous, but realistically knew that the likelihood of catching one myself was minuscule. Things slowed down a little for a while, but fishing hard on the bottom and casting my rigs under the jetty improved my catch rates slightly. I also moved around from time to time to try my luck in new spots, and this also threw up some new species too. 

This candystripe cardinalfish was the first species of the trip that I’d caught before. I caught one in Kagoshima in Japan in 2020. 

I caught my first damselfish of the trip too. Brown damsels can be very difficult to identify, but I’m confident this is my first silty damselfish.

Chris called me over to show me his second tripodfish species of the trip, a short-nosed tripodfish. 

I also caught this funky, colourful little bluelined hind.

My bottom fishing eventually produced what I hoped it would in the form of a couple of new shrimpgoby species. They were sandwiched around a third new species that I suspected might be my first scorpionfish of the trip. I was wrong about that though and when I discovered what it was the fish in question’s name justified my mistake in a way.

My decision to fish hard on the bottom produced my first ever masked shrimpgoby.

This false scorpionfish had me fooled.

 This lagoon shrimpgoby had some very colourful markings.

As the sun began to dip towards the horizon, the fishing slowed down again. By that point we were all pretty exhausted. Jet lag and dehydration were also no doubt a factor again. Also, despite repeatedly applying generous amounts of sun cream to my sunburnt calf it was still very sore. We called it a day just as it got dark, headed back to the hotel to get freshened up and then went out for food and beer again. 

The end of a long day on Bedok Jetty!

For Chris and I it had been a very productive day fishing with small prawn baits, catching lots of small but interesting species. For Lee, it had been another tough day fishing exclusively with artificials, with not much reward for the many hours of hard work he'd put in. That’s what can happen when you are determined to catch something bigger I suppose.

Tight lines, Scott.

Click here for the next part.