More species hunting adventures on Okinawa: Part 3.

The first time Lillian and I visited Okinawa, I stupidly took the incorrect international driving permit with me (I now know there are three different ones), and we could not hire a car as a result. This limited our mobility and because of this I fished one particular spot close to our accommodation several times, two concrete piers near the South Steps Dive Site in Chatan. During those sessions, I’d caught a few different species there, and as we could park our hire car nearby, that’s where we headed to continue our first day’s fishing.

As you can see, it was a bit windy and looked like it could rain at any moment!

The railings around the two piers were quite badly rusted and in a generally poor condition when I fished on them two years ago, with some sections having been removed completely and replaced with scaffolding poles. When we arrived this time, the piers were both fenced off completely at the top, but there were people fishing on one of them, so we decided to climb around the side of the fencing to fish on the other one. Once we got down to the bottom, I realised that the condition of the railings had become even worse, becoming unsafe and this was no doubt why the two piers had been fenced off. Fishing behind one of the sturdier looking sections, both of us started catching a few fish, most of them were species that we hadn’t caught at the first spot, which was great.

Some of them I’d caught before, like this monogrammed monocle bream,..

…and this yellowtail devil. 

I also caught a few new species. The first was this bowtie damselfish, which was a beautiful deep blue colour.

I caught my first striped large-eye bream,..

…and then Ryan and I caught a few of these very colourful sixbar wrasse.

We both also caught our first ever Oriental butterflyfish.

Towards the end of the session, we caught quite a lot of Indo-Pacific sergeant and a couple of other sergeant species. The two I caught, weren’t new species for me and Ryan caught a third that I did not, that would have been a new species had I caught one. Since publishing this post, I've discovered a fourth species was in amongst those I caught, which was a new species!

We caught quite a few Indo-Pacific sergeant.

Male Indo-Pacific sergeant turn blue when they are breeding.
04/12/25. Update: So do male Okinawa sergeant, which this is an example of.

We both caught a few blackspot sergeant.

Ryan caught the only yellowtail sergeant of the trip, just before we called it a day.

So, our first day of species hunting on Okinawa had been a great success. Between the two of us, we’d managed to catch over thirty different species. In the evening, we visited a fishing tackle shop and then went out for some sushi. The next day, heavy rain was forecast, so we decided to head north for a drive to Nago. There, we wanted to fish for freshwater species in a small river, and maybe visit Kouri Island too if the rain wasn’t too heavy. 

Tight lines, Scott.

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More species hunting adventures in Singapore: Part 7.

On the morning of the last day of our holiday, we got up quite early and took a Grab taxi to Bedok Jetty. As we arrived, a local angler caught an impressive wolf herring on a live bait. My mate Lee caught a small one when we visited Bedok Jetty last year, but this thing was huge and had a nasty set of teeth on it!

Wolf herring, not the most attractive fish in the sea, that's for sure!

Setting up my rod under the first shelter on the jetty, mainly because it looked like it was about to start raining at any moment, I started off by tying on a set of sabiki. The lady who had caught the wolf herring tried to sell me a set of her handmade ones. I'd watched her pull up several full sets of sardinella using them whilst I got my own rod set up, but I decided to try fishing with my own ones. There is definitely a knack to catching sardinella using sabiki. A knack that the lady had clearly mastered, as I watched her repeatedly pull up five or six almost every drop whilst a teenager on my other side, also using a set of her sabiki only caught one or two. I struggled to catch any on my shop bought rig, but eventually landed a one or two a couple of times.

My first fringescale sardinella. The locals target various species of sardinella, using one or two as bait and taking the rest home to eat.

Switching to fishing small chunks of prawn close to the bottom, I caught a few pink ear emperor and a diamond wrasse before adding three more species to my tally. None of them were new to me, but the third was my fourth shrimpgoby species of the trip. I love shrimpgoby, there's just something about them!

First up was a juvenile yellowfin snapper,..

...which was followed by a monogrammed monocle bream,..

...and then I caught this lovely masked shrimpgoby.

Just look at some of the colourful markings on those fins!

At this point, we decided to move to a new spot, and as I was keen to catch some tripodfish. Having been given some great information on exactly where to try, we moved up to a spot close to the end of the jetty. Not long after we sat down, it started raining, but Lillian had brought a large umbrella, so we sheltered underneath it. There were other anglers fishing either side of us who had lines out, so I couldn't quite fish the exact area I had been told to, but I was able to drop my rig in reasonably close to it. My first drop produced another wonderfully colourful shrimpgoby.

A peacock shrimpgoby, with its reflective, almost metallic blue spotting. Simply stunning!

Casting out and waiting for a short period, if I didn’t get any bites, I’d slowly bump my running ledger rig along the bottom, repeating this process until something hit my bait. This produced a few oriental sillago and my bait also got stripped a few times.

I'm not sure why, but I just don't find sillago that interesting.

Feeling slightly frustrated, I switched to a slightly smaller hook and tiny pieces of prawn. I should have done this sooner, as this slight tweak worked a treat, and saw me catching two more new species in consecutive casts.

The first was this long-tail tripodfish.

Followed shortly afterwards by my first ever longspine ponyfish.

Before we left, we decided to try one last spot, right at the end of the jetty on its left-hand arm. This produced a few butterfly whiptail, and then the last addition to my species tally of the entire trip.

The colouration of butterfly whiptail can vary, but the small black dot at the root of the tail encircled with a V is the feature to look for.

This lattice monocle bream was my 114th species of the trip. A total I was very happy with!

After about a dozen "last casts", I ran out of bait, but Lillian found a scrap of dried up prawn on the ground and told me to have one last "last cast". The dehydrated scrap proved to be a tough bait for the fish to easily strip off, and after missing a few bites, I caught my last fish of the trip. It just happened to be the same species as the very first fish of the trip, caught three weeks earlier when we visited Bedok Jetty. Time flies when you're having species hunting fun!

This pink ear emperor was a nice fish to finish off my Asian species hunt!

Packing away my tackle for the final time, we walked back to the car park where we had been dropped off and took another Grab taxi up to Mandai Wildlife Reserve, where we spent a few hours exploring Bird Paradise. It was raining while we were there, so some of the birds were taking shelter, but enough were out that the experience was still enjoyable.

Who doesn’t love penguins,..

…flamingoes,..

…colourful parrots,..

...and birds that look a bit like Robert Smith of The Cure? Lillian is a lifelong fan, but somehow didn't see the likeness.

In the evening, we headed out for a nice meal at BBQ Box, just around the corner from our hotel. Way too many tasty grilled skewers and a few delicious salads were washed down with a huge jug of ice-cold lemon and lime tea. With a long day of travelling to do the following day, we didn't want to be suffering with a hangover!

Just a small selection of delicious grilled meat and seafood skewers we enjoyed.

Sliced lotus root and smashed cucumber salad. A balanced diet is important, after all.

The following morning, we returned to Changi Airport, the fourth time we had used it in three weeks! Killing some time before we had to board our flight back to the UK, we visited its butterfly garden! My friend Nick had tasked us with getting photographs of ten different species of tropical butterflies whilst we were away, and we had failed miserably! We’d seen hundreds, but they don’t tend to sit still long enough for a photo in the wild. In the butterfly garden, a couple were more than happy to pose.

This is a common rose.

This is a clipper.

Boarding the plane home at the end of a holiday is always tinged with sadness, but all good things must come to an end. Lillian and I both love visiting Asia, and I love species hunting there. Visiting Singapore, Cambodia and Thailand, we’d had an amazing time and have decided to return to Japan next November for another three wek adventure. We’ll be revisiting some of the places we’ve been to during three previous trips, as well as some new places. As always, I'll be doing a spot of species hunting too.

My fishing sessions had been enjoyable and very productive. Here's a list of the 114 species I caught over the duration of the trip, with all the new species in bold.

1. Anchor Tuskfish
2. Argus Wrasse
3. Banded Archerfish
4. Banded Grunter
5. Banded Sergeant
6. Banded Silver Biddy
7. Barred Mudskipper
8. Bigeye Cusk
9. Bigeye Trevelly
10. Black-spotted Snubnose Goby
11. Blackline Rasbora
12. Blackspot Sargeant
13. Bluegill Longfin
14. Bluelined Hind
15. Brownstripe Red Snapper
    
16. Butterfly Whiptail
17. Candystripe Cardinalfish
18. Cantor’s Gudgeon
19. Checkerboard Wrasse
20. Chinese Demoiselle
21. Chocolate Hind
22. Common Silver Biddy
23. Congaturi Halfbeak
24. Cook’s Cardinalfish
25. Crested Grunter
26. Decorated Ponyfish
27. Diamond Wrasse
28. Dory Snapper
29. Duskytail Grouper
30. False Scorpionfish
31. Fanbellied Filefish
32. Flame Cardinalfish
33. Forest Betta
34. Fringescale Sardinella
35. Giant Mudskipper
36. Giant Trevally
37. Goldlined Sweetlip
38. Green Puller
    
39. Grey Demoiselle
40. Harry Hotlips
41. Houndfish
42. Humpback Cardinal
43. Humpbacked Cardinalfish
44. Indo-Pacific Sergeant
45. Indochinese Spotted Barb
46. Iridescent Shark Catfish
47. Jansen’s Wrasse
48. Javaen Barb
49. Javan Ricefish
50. Javelin Grunter
51. Knight Goby
52. Kop’s Glass Perchlet
53. Lattice Monocle Bream
54. Long-tail Tripodfish
    
55. Longspine Ponyfish
56. Lunartail Puffer
57. Malayan Tiger Barb
58. Mangrove Jack
59. Marble Goby
60. Masked Shrimpgoby
61. Mayan Cichlid
62. Minute Mudskipper
63. Monogrammed Monocle Bream
64. Moon Wrasse
65. Mottled Spinefoot
66. Nile Tilapia
67. Obscure Damsel
68. Ochre-striped Cardinalfish
69. One-spot Snapper
70. Onespot Demoiselle
    
71. Orbiculate Cardinalfish
72. Oriental Sillago
73. Ornate Goby
74. Pacific Dusky Wrasse
75. Pale Rasbora
76. Peacock Shrimpgoby
77. Pearly-spotted Wrasse
78. Pink Ear Emperor
79. Pink-Speckled Shrimpgoby
80. Red Tilapia
81. Redbelly Yellowtail Fusilier
82. Redcoat
83. Rib Bar Cardinalfish
84. Robust Mangrove Goby
85. Scissortail Rasbora
86. Siamese Glassfish
87. Silty Wrasse
88. Silver Demoiselle
89. Silver Sillago
90. Spanish Flag Snapper
91. Spectacled Sandgoby
    
92. Streaky Rockskipper
93. Stripe-nosed Halfbeak
94. Striped Snakehead
95. Striped Snapper
96. Sulphur Goatfish
97. Threadfin Acara
98. Three-spot Cardinalfish
99. Threespot Dascyllus
100. Tiger Barb
101. Timor Wrasse
102. Toothpony
     
103. Tropical Sand Goby
104. Two Spot Demoiselle
105. Two-lined Monocle Bream
106. Vachelli’s Glass Perchlet
107. Weber’s Chromis
108. Western Mosquitofish
109. Whipfin Silver-biddy
110. White Shouldered Whiptail
111. Whitecheek Monocle Bream
112. Yellow Banded Damselfish
113. Yellowfin Snapper
114. Yellowfin Surgeonfish

Adding the new species to the list of all the species I've ever caught, when I got back, I realised that I had passed the five hundred mark. A great achievement that I'm very proud of. Over the coming years, I'd like to try to hit one thousand eventually!

Tight lines, Scott.

Acknowledgments:

I'd like to thank fellow species hunters Luke and Arthur for their advice on fishing various venues around Phuket before the trip. It was very useful!

Most of all though, I'd yet again like to thank fellow species hunter Jiayuan for his invaluable help throughout the duration of my trip. Whether it be information on the best places to try for certain species, or helping to identify some of the fish I'd caught, his knowledge was incredibly useful and equally impressive! We kept in touch throughout pretty much my entire trip. This, despite the fact he was busy with university exams and projects. Sadly, his academic commitments meant that we didn't get the chance to meet up during either of the Singapore phases of our adventure, which I would have loved. Hopefully, the next time I'm in Singapore we can go species hunting together!

Species hunting adventures in Singapore: Day 2.

On day two we decided to head to Bedok Jetty, a very popular fishing venue on the south coast of Singapore. Before heading there we visited a supermarket to stock up on plenty of water, some fruit and a packet of frozen raw prawns for Chris and I to use as bait. Lee would be fishing exclusively with lures again.

The jetty was very busy with both anglers and other people out walking or cycling. It proved to be a good choice of venue for us and we racked up quite a few species as the day went on.

Bedok Jetty. A must visit venue in Singapore for species hunting anglers.

I started the day how I’d ended the previous one, by catching a juvenile grouper. As the morning progressed Chris and I steadily added more species to our tallies, fishing small pieces of prawn on small hooks close to the bottom. Lee fished with metal jigs most of the morning as he wanted to catch a queenfish, a species that is targeted frequently by the locals. There were a lot of tiny bait fish around. Every now and then they’d get hit from below, so Lee was hopeful it was his target species that were harassing them.

My first fish of the day was this sixbar grouper.

After a few diamond wrasse I caught this butterfly whiptail.

Chris caught this long tail tripodfish. How cool! I wanted to catch one. 

I caught a monogrammed monocle bream,

…a herring scad…

…and my first pearly-spotted wrasse of the trip. 

Whilst Chris and I were steadily catching fish, Lee was jigging away with various metals and after a few knocks his effort was eventually rewarded with a fish in the shape of a greater lizardfish. 

Not what Lee was hoping for, but he was off the mark at least. 

After a few hours, a rod in a holder on the railings just along from us started bouncing away. We shouted over to the angler who owned it, who had wandered off, to let him know that he had a fish on. After a short fight and with the aid of another angler’s net he landed a nice queenfish. Seeing this, Chris and I set up heavy lure rods and joined Lee to do a bit of jigging for a while. After about an hour with not even a touch though, I switched back to fishing small pieces of prawn on my Rock Rover again! Chris soon joined me and we both caught a few fanbellied filefish amongst other species we’d already had. 

The fanbellied filefish! Such an awesome fish!

Lee was still jigging away, trying to get his lures out near some bait balls further out. I don’t think he was quite able to reach them though although closer in he hooked something that turned out to be a wolf herring, a rather bizarre fish that has the delicate body and scales of a herring and a cavernous mouth full of nasty long teeth. 

Lee’s wolf herring. What a weird fish. 

Into the early afternoon Chris and I continued to catch a reasonable number of fish. Now and then the various wrasse species would be beaten to our bait and if we were lucky we’d catch a new species. There are several sardinella species around Bedok Jetty and some local anglers were jigging sabiki to catch them. I switched to a set of sabiki myself to try and catch some but had no luck. The locals were very proficient at catching them, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what they were doing to catch so many. Later in the session I did catch one on a small piece of prawn though!

Chris caught a few of these rib bar cardinalfish before I finally got one too. 

My prawn caught goldstripe sardinella.

Switching to fishing on the bottom with a running ledger, I was hoping to catch some shrimpgoby. Before I caught any though it produced this freckled goatfish.

Mid afternoon there were a few flashes of lightning, and several seconds later, the sound of thunder broke the relative quiet of the jetty. Looking to the south west, dark clouds were drifting over the multitude of container ships waiting to get into port. Was the Singapore weather about to go from hot and very sweaty to hot and very wet? We would soon find out!

Tight lines, Scott.

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