More species hunting adventures on Okinawa: Part 9.

On our final evening on Okinawa, after doing some of our packing, Ryan and I popped out for an hour or so, for one last session. We drove five minutes from our apartment, to the fenced off concrete piers down by the South Steps Dive Site in Chatan. Taking minimal tackle and a few raw prawns, our targets were nocturnal species, and that’s exactly what we caught.

First up was this redcoat, a species of squirrelfish found all the way from the western Pacific to the Mediterranean Sea. I caught my first in Singapore last year.

I also caught my first ever five-lined cardinalfish. 

This solitary pinecone soldierfish was also my first ever. 

I’d already caught a striped large-eye bream earlier in the trip. 

My last fish on Okinawa were two iridescent cardinalfish. My first ever also!

Ryan’s final fish on Okinawa was this samurai squirrelfish.

So, our Okinawa species hunting had come to an end. With the remainder of our packing still to do, we headed back to the apartment. Despite quite a lot of wet weather during our stay on Okinawa, we’d managed to do a reasonable amount of fishing, had caught lots of fish, and had racked up almost eighty species between the two us, which was a great achievement. Adding the species we caught in Tokyo and Enoshima, I wondered if reaching one hundred was possible. The following day we were flying to Osaka and Ryan’s girlfriend Xin Yun was joining us from Singapore for the last part of our trip. We had a busy schedule planned, with lots of sightseeing and day trips to other places during both our five days in Osaka, and when we returned to Tokyo for a couple of days before flying home, so fishing opportunities would be limited. Reaching one hundred species would be tough, but we were keen to try and catch a few more to try and achieve it!

Tight lines, Scott.