Species hunting adventures on Rhodes: Part 1.

Last week, Lillian and I were supposed to fly to the Greek island of Rhodes, but our flight ended up being a casualty of the chaos caused by an issue with the UK’s Air Traffic Control System. A full day at Edinburgh Airport, checking in luggage, going through security, waiting in departures, being boarded, sitting on the plane for two hours, being removed from the plane again, waiting around in departures again, finally finding out our flight had been cancelled and waiting to collect our suitcase before heading home, wasn’t much fun to say the least. Somehow, using my phone on the tram back into town, I managed to get us on another Ryanair flight two days later. Our original holiday was nine nights, so we still had a week long trip to look forward to.

Arriving last Thursday afternoon, we picked up our luggage, collected our hire car and drove to our accommodation, located in the small inland town of Archangelos. It was great to be away again! Keen to do a spot of fishing, we drove down to the nearby coastal village of Stegna where I spent an hour or so scratching around with small hooks using small pieces of isome. I was soon catching a few fish.

The northern beach in Stegna, a popular little tourist spot.

Further south there was a second harbour that we'd visit later in the evening.

This tiny white seabream was the first fish of the trip.

It was soon followed by a fish that I didn’t recognise. A new species! How exciting! This is the strangely named striped piggy. Perhaps it’s called that because it’s a type of grunt.

Before too long, the resident yellow spotted puffer began destroying my scented worm imitation. They’re a real pain to be honest. Turning my attention to fishing down the harbour’s walls I caught a couple of ornate wrasse and a slender goby.

These really are a total nuisance!

I popped the slender goby into my photo tank to aid identification.

Working our way around to the mouth of the harbour, I spotted some tiny fish hiding under a boat. Taking a closer look when they came out to nibble at my isome, I realised that they were sweeper, a group of fish I had never seen in real life before. They were tiny, so I switched to a split shot rig with a tanago hook and baited it up with a tiny piece of isome. Jigging this up and down generated the most interest, and eventually I caught one of them and popped it into my photo tank.

Targeting tiny fish can be very challenging!

Sweeper are a strange looking group of fish and this was my first ever. I'm fairly confident this is a rhomboid sweeper, but if you think otherwise please get in touch!

Having caught two new species within an hour or so, it was a fantastic start to the trip. I had a few species in mind before flying out that I had never caught before, but these two had not really been in my thoughts, so were most welcome captures!

Stegna has two small harbours, and I was keen to see what the second was like, but by that point we were both quite hungry, so we went for some gyros and Greek salad in a nearby taverna first.

Arriving at the second harbour, along at the southern end of the village, we had a look around before I started fishing. It was very shallow, and there were lots of boats, all moored very closely together. Ropes everywhere would also make for tricky fishing but we found a gap and in it Lillian spotted a very odd fish just below the surface that she thought was dead. It looked like a leaf!

That's not a leaf and it’s not dead either!

Floating on its side, it was slowly moving around, and I vaguely remembered seeing a video about the species, but couldn’t remember its name. I’d later do some digging and discover what we had spotted was a juvenile Atlantic tripletail. They exhibit some clever behaviour, pretend to be a dead leaf in order to avoid predation themselves whilst using this tactic to stealthily hunt prey of their own.

Quickly rigging up a piece of isome, I slowly lowered it down in the vicinity of the fish and gave it a few twitches, but it showed no interest at all. My efforts only served to annoy the fish, and eventually it swam off down under the boats. Still on its side, it looked like a flatfish as it made its escape.

Slightly disappointed, I continued fishing and we made our way to the harbour’s narrow entrance. It was much deeper there and I added a couple more species to my tally.

First to munch a piece of isome was this pharaoh cardinalfish. Only my second ever, I caught my first on Cyprus.

Next was a redcoat squirrelfish. My first in the Mediterranean Sea, having caught them in Singapore and Okinawa.

It was getting late, and we were both pretty tired, but we had another look for the tripletail before we headed back up the hill to Archangelos. Sadly we didn’t see it, but I was hopeful it might not go to far and I may get another, better opportunity to catch it, if I returned with a small fish to use as bait! It had been a very interesting start to the trip and I was looking forward to finding out what other odd species might turn up!

Tight lines, Scott.