Fishing Adventures in Thailand
Date: 10th – 14th April 2009
The Mission: Test some newly-tied flies, catch some Blue, Thai & Golden Mahseer
Participants: The A Team: Jon, Bobby, Ben (left to right in photo below) and Karen guide, Chakik
The first day’s efforts started modestly enough late in the afternoon, with teaching Bobby to cast a flyrod. That’s always a challenge, but he took to it like a duck to water!
Within 10 minutes or so he was getting some distance and looking like a credible threat to the fish population… 20 minutes later, he had his first fish on a flyrod!
We were trying to crack the code on a heavily populated section of water, where previous success had been intermittent. Earlier trips revealed some of the available biomass – caddis, crickets, cicadas, butterflies, beetles, prawns, leeches, minnows, fruit and flowers…
Armed with various patterns intended to persuade the fish that this time, WE had the real deal, we set forth pregnant with expectation! On this occasion, numerous splashy attacks without hookups on Black or White Woolly Buggers eventually suggested a change of strategy. The old New Zealand standby was implemented – #6 Royal Wulff with a #16 tungsten bead-head Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear flashback on a 2 ft dropper…
First cast – a fish literally charged the nymph! The Royal Wulff attracted immediate interest as well… bingo, we are in business! Damn, I love it when something familiar works equally well in a strange location! However, the good start was terminated abruptly when the long-threatening thunderstorm unleashed the first gusts of wind, followed by some resounding claps of thunder that echoed around the narrow valley. The blackened skies opened with reckless abandon, and the A Team bolted for cover as the huge raindrops bounced waist high!
The unfortunate consequence of that was revealed next morning – the clear greenish-tinted waters replaced by a river with a definite dirty tinge… This is not necessarily a bad thing either, as most serious fishermen know – often it heralds a great day to come – and thus it was!
The next 2 days were filled with action, excitement, adrenalin and heartbreak. The #6 Royal Wulff in original, chartruese and orange wing colours were extremely popular with the 3 prevalent Mahseer species!
Fish large and small accepted them with relish… The Mahseer also expressed a very serious love affair with #16 gold-ribbed Hare’s Ear nymphs, and similar patterns were not rejected.
During a three day period, we landed over 40 fish and missed, lost or were humiliated by at least three times that many! The large Mahseer are very, very difficult fish to subdue – a fish of 10+ kgs is capable of straightening a premium grade hook in a heart-beat, or breaking 10kg tippet… The initial run is insanely fast – even with the brake set to “full-on” on my Ross reel, one fish spun the reel so fast it over-ran. Any fumbles with line management are punished severely.
Despite trying really, really hard to hook and land a big one, we were repeatedly out-smarted, out-manouvred or out-muscled… Despite the one-sided nature of the competition, we remained undaunted, and learned a lot in the process…. Next time!!!
Gear used by all was was #7 weight rods, #7 or #8 WF floating lines. Various leader combinations were experimented with, but 9ft, 8lb trout tapered leaders are definitely not the right answer, even on smaller fish…. A 16lb, 9ft “Striped Bass” tapered leader with 6ft of 16lb tippet gives you half a chance of keeping a big fish out of the logs!
Mahseer are sensitive to line shadow, visible drag, line in the air, human movement, clothing colours… the damned things are SO much like big brown trout, its extraordinary!
