The world's best flyfishing site.

Español

Manual de Lanzado
Sección de Carlos
The Downloads

Falsecast

Monday: Paul Arden
Tuesday: Harps
Wednesday: Bernd Ziesche
Thursday: Mr T.
Friday: Ray
Saturday: Viking Lars
Sunday: Bruce Richards

Ronan's report

Contents... Front Page Fly Casting The Manual Beginners Flytying Articles Reviews Saltwater Stillwater The Flow Carlos Steve Lars Deano Matt Paul Pic of the Day Movies Vortex Fishmail Snapcast Advice CCS Rod Data Glossary FP archive

Irhamy and I were in Rompin earlier last week fishing for sailfish. Rompin is a small sleepy coastal town in the southeast of the Peninsular Malaysia and had one of the world's best sailfish fisheries just 15 to 25 nautical miles off its coast. Sailfish could be found all over Malaysia's salt water but it was in Rompin where they congregate in numbers, perhaps to feed and breed before moved on to other parts of the world. Little is known about the sailfish migration patterns but according to the locals, sailfish could be found in Rompin all the time however its congregation peaked from June to October plus minus a month or two depending on the global tidal and temperature patterns.

I caught my first sailfish using bait about 17 years ago near Pulau Aur, a small island further south while fishing for mackerel. Those were the days when I fished almost every other week in the Southeast China sea, off monsoon season between 1997 and 2000. I also have seen my fishing mates boated quite a few sailfish and a juvenile black marlin but all these were by-catches because our objectives were to fill up our icebox with food fish. Back then we didn't want the trophies but didn't exactly complain when we hook up one of those billfish. Hooking up a sailfish was definitely a challenge because the fastest swimming fish in the world was indeed fast and its jumps were spectacular, nice to see but to a bunch of meat hunters the fight took too long and that was too much a downtime. Mind you this was before the Saltiga and Stella era and we were using mostly the more primitive graphite spinning reels with large spool with 30lb mono lines. A second billfish on a trip was already one too many.

Then sometime around year 2000, I picked up fly fishing. I read about catching sailfish on fly, have seen it on DVDs, heard about tourists and a few local fly fishers caught sailfish on fly at Rompin, practically my own backyard as I was born only in a town less than an hour and a half drive away from Rompin! Curious, I started to bring my fly gear whenever I go out to the sea. I found out it was difficult to fly fish when your mates wanted to do popping and jigging on the same trip.

It wasn't about until three years ago I made catching sailfish on fly a mission and went on my first fly-only trip with Yew Kong. We chartered a local boatman. Here was the problem. We chartered a boatman who didn't believe sailfish could be caught on fly consistently. After the second day into the trip and realising Yew Kong and I were not interested in catching sailfish any other way, the boatman tried to talk us into using live bait hooked onto a fly and said that's what some fly fishers did. I just stopped talking to him and walked away. I could not really blame the boatman because we were paying him for what he would normally charge for live bait drift trolling trip. He was probably too lazy or didn't want to spend his motor hours and fuel on trolling teasers. So we didn’t catch any sailfish on that trip, surprisingly! We went back on the same year, willing to pay a bit more but had to cut short the second trip because Yew Kong had hepatitis and felt sick.

Fed up with the pace it was going, I finally decided life is too short to be wasted away on trial and error. So I started looking for boatman with full fly fishing experience. That was a problem because although there are many boats for charter in Rompin, not all of them are reliable and the best boats with full fly fishing experience are owned or fully booked by professional recreational fishing charters that are catering mainly to foreign tourists. Unfortunately that also means I would have to pay two or three times more than what I would normally pay. Anyway, when Irhamy told me he could get a boat with full fly fishing experience last year, I immediately confirmed the boat because I had given up looking for cheaper alternatives. I had my doubts but decided to confirm it anyway. To a local like me, it didn't make much sense to use these professional charters because I did not have language or cultural barriers in dealing with the boat operators. Professional charters did not actually offer the same value to me as compared to their other foreign customers or so I thought.

This thought could have been true if I wanted to get sailfish using conventional tackles but certainly not catching those sailfish on fly. Mind you we are talking about no popping, no trolling, no life bait hooked to a fly but pure sight casting to a teased up fish. I later found out to fish for teased up sailfish you’ll need a team, a bloody good team that worked like clockwork. First of all the skipper had to know and believed in what he was doing. The deckhands must already have various fish teasing skills for various conditions. The fisher had to make a good one placement shot and resist the temptation to jump the gun. More importantly the whole team must be able to improvise in fast changing conditions.

Irhamy and I only fished for two full days. We teased up more than 50 fishes, had 23 bites and boated five but the fishes were not big. Had the second day weather was better both of us could have landed more and bigger fish. The boatman and deckhand provided excellent services and definitely matched the high fees. We were constantly on the move looking for fishes, burnt a lot of fuel, adapting methods to various sea conditions. This was my first fully guided fly fishing experience and I was glad that everything went on exactly as planned although I must say it felt weird being a tourist in my backyard. I will definitely use the same charter again next season for the bigger fishes, hopefully. This team definitely knew what they were doing. Until then I probably have to cut down whiskies and stopped buying tackles for a year...

Mr.T

Pic of Day

Mobile APP

www.sexyloops.com
Copyright © 1998-2014