Paul Arden | Tuesday, 13 February 2024
Well I still haven’t solved my popper hooking woes with Giant Snakehead. It’s a tough time just now on the lake. Afternoons are windy as hell, which makes boat positioning hard work, especially on your own! But more concerning to me is that the last three Snakehead eats have all spat the hook.
Over the years I’ve tried numerous things, such as tandem hooks, tube flies with dislocated hooks, a popper and subsurface combo, striking immediately or not at all. What I’m going to try next is bigger hooks!! I’m currently fishing 1/0 or 1 and I’m thinking that If I go bigger, the wider gape and increased weight, *might* result in more successful hookups. After all, these are fish that have all eaten the fly. I should have a better hook up ratio and it’s really frustrating on those days when you work hard for just one eat, only for the fly to be spat.
Next week, we should have our lumilines back in stock. We have 66 or these coming over. 100ft +/- DT Intermediate glow-in-the-dark fly lines. I have many people who have requested them and so I doubt we will have them in stock for very long. And I also suspect we won’t have them again for a long time to come afterwards as well, since RIO have stopped OEM. So it’s probably your last chance to get these highly fun and great training lines.
Looking at current retail prices of fly lines, I’m thinking 100USD/ line, which may or may not include shipping, would be a reasonable price. They do last a long time, so that’s good news. I still have two of the previous batch on the Battleship that work well. One of these I even left up on top of a stump for six months, until the water level was high enough to unwrap it again. That one is still a go-to line for me as well!
This is quite a hectic month for me, despite the slower fishing. The following weekend I’ll be down in KL, having a specialist roof rack fitted to the Snakehead Truck, so that I can “car top” the Rocket C over to Thailand and launch off the beaches, as we used to do with “Squeaker”. I’m looking forward to visiting “Light My Fire Bar and Camping Society” again! And it will be nice to do some imaginary SW fly fishing too. Thailand is always a fun holiday, at least it is during the “off-season”.
I have many Zoom lessons at the moment. Many of my students now are really kicking arse with their casting. Which is really excellent to see. I love seeing their improvements. Four of them this past week in particular have really impressed me.
TimK is over for a fishing trip at the end of the month. Looking forward to catching up with Tim again and putting the world to rights over a few beers and a campfire – and hopefully he sticks some fish as well. I’m really curious to see how this summer pans out, with the high lake levels the Wet Season gave us this year, I’m hoping for good things!! So far it’s looking very promising.
Sungai Tiang is open. No one has been in yet this year, and it hasn’t rained for a couple of weeks now. So the river is running gin-clear and fly fishing perfect. The cost of a trip here is 400USD/day for one person and 600USD/day for two sharing. This includes all jungle meals, and a couple of the lads carrying your gear, so that you don’t have to while fishing. It also includes the 90 minute boat trip each way, in and out, and, if you are lucky, an exciting bamboo raft journey downstream as well.
You will need an adequate level of fitness for jungle stream fishing in the tropics and a sense of adventure. I will be present during the first few trips to help smooth things out. And yes I can help with fishing and casting advice! If you can get in soon then great. This is Dry Season in Malaysia and so you have a really excellent opportunity right now to see this river in its prime. Preferably plan for 4 or 5 fishing days on the river and one day either side to get in and out. And if you want to extend your trip to the lake then even better!
Incidentally if anyone savvy in these things, would like to help me build their website and social media platforms, then I would really like some assistance. I just don’t have the time to do this all by myself at the moment, particularly since I am planning a new Sexyloops site imminently too!
Have a great week and I hope to see some of you over here real soon.
Cheers, Paul