More species hunting adventures on Okinawa: Part 8.

On our last day on Okinawa, we got up reasonably early and began the drive up to Cape Hedo. To break up the journey a little bit, we took a slight detour after leaving the Okinawa Expressway, and headed to Untenbaru Port on Yagaji Island. As forecast, the sky was pretty dull again and shortly after arriving and setting up our tackle, a passing heavy shower had us taking cover in the hire-car. It didn't last too long thankfully, and we were soon fishing, but it was pretty poor to be honest, with not much biting.

Untenbaru Port on Yagaji Island. Probably the least productive spot we tried during our time on Okinawa.

Before we decided to head over the Kouri Bridge to fish in Kouri Island's port, I did manage to catch a couple of fish. One of them was an addition to our trip tally, so visiting the spot wasn't a complete waste of time

A small saw-jawed monocle bream was not a new species for me, but it was the first one of the trip.

Not my first of the trip, but it's always cool to catch a butterflyfish.

A short drive later, we were back fishing out of the boot of the hire car in Kouri Island's port. There was another angler already fishing there when we arrived. Float fishing small shrimps under a float and piling in ground bait around it, his endeavours went some way to explain why there seemed to be less fish around at the area we had fished so successfully a couple of days previously. I really struggled to catch much, with a brown damselfish being the only potential new species for me. Ryan hooked a large puffer, but lost it on the surface. A short while later, his efforts were rewarded with a few clownfish, which I was quite envious about.

What a difference a couple of days make, and a few kilograms of ground bait a few metres out to our right!

It was my turn to catch an undescribed species of damselfish. This one being different to the one Ryan had caught earlier in the trip.

Ryan caught a couple of Nemo's cousins! This one is a yellowtail clownfish.

Aware that we still had to drive up to the most northerly point on the main island, and also because the fishing wasn't great, we didn't stay on Kouri Island too long and were soon back on the road again. About an hour later, we arrived at Cape Hedo. It was a stunning spot, but unfortunately a strong onshore wind and a swell breaking over the rocks below the cliffs ruled out any fishing there.

Cape Hedo was not really fishable. Not with ultra light tackle anyway!

Luckily, we had passed a nice looking port about five minutes before we got to Cape Hedo, so we decided just to head back there. It was quite overcast when we arrived at Ginama Fish Harbour, and it looked like it could rain at any moment, but we parked the car and walked around the harbour's inner area to fish in its entrance and down the harbour's inner walls. The fishing was pretty good, and we added a few more species to our trip tally.

Nice and sheltered.

I caught a vagabond butterflyfish,..

... a few dusky farmerfish,..

...and a couple of tomato clownfish.

For some reason, Ryan was again somehow managing to find every possible snag on the bottom and spent a bit of time retying his rig. When he did manage to avoid the snags, he pulled up his second thicklip wrasse species of the trip.

Ryan's blackeye thicklip.

Ryan then decided to give some lures a go and tied on a luminous prawn. Casting it out into the centre of the harbour, he worked it back towards him, close to the bottom. Meanwhile, I stuck with fishing chunks of prawn down the harbour wall. With a fair amount of bait left to use up, I began cutting up a few prawns into small pieces and throwing them in to see if I could attract some more fish to the area. After a while I got a quite violent take and struck into something a little bit feisty. After a brief battle, a small grouper came to the surface.

My first ever honeycomb grouper. Ryan really wanted to catch a grouper, so it was his turn to be a little bit jealous!

No for too long though! Shortly afterwards, a couple of them took a liking to his brightly coloured prawn lure and smashed it! He was over the moon to get his first ever grouper.

We carried on fishing for a while longer, and somehow despite the sky looking like it was going to burst at any moment, it stayed dry. I caught two more species for the first time, and we spotted a juvenile threadfin trevally swimming past, which was very cool.

My first ever narrowstripe cardinalfish,...

...and streamlined spinefoot. My second rabbitfish species of the trip.

It was cool to see this juvenile threadfin trevally swimming by with its extremely long, filamentous dorsal and anal fin tips.

Before we left, we took a walk around the harbour's outer breakwater. We had a few casts out into the middle of the harbour, but it was very snaggy. As I was tying up another rig, Ryan called over to say that he'd spotted a weird fish on the bottom. Going over to where he was, I immediately recognised it as a lionfish! We both tried to catch it, but it just wasn't interested, eventually drifting off down into the rocks out of sight. It would have been great to spend more time trying to catch it, but with a two-hour drive back to Chatan to make, as well as packing our cases for our flight to Osaka the following day to do, we had to leave. Besides, I also wanted to try and squeeze in a short fishing session after dark when we got back to Chatan, if time allowed!

Tight lines, Scott.