Paul Arden | Tuesday, 10 June 2025
I’ve been trying to catch a Gourami for a couple of weeks now. Evenings that weren’t blown out by thunderstorms I’d normally find one, two, rarely three gourami. With the occasional inspection. I’ve been trying different parts of the lake to try to get more shots.
On Sunday I saw seven gourami and had two refusals. Blew a couple up on the shot. This is the most gourami I have seen in years. To catch gourami, on this lake at least, is extremely difficult. Yesterday evening I finally got one to the boat. Not a big one but it is a result. Hopefully I’ll get one of the big fellas this week. A big gourami I think is anything over 4Kg.
Not much in the way of snakehead activity at the moment. But it’s always a nice change to be fishing dry flies and with the possibility of hooking a 4-5Kg fish it’s often quite high-stress fishing. These shots can be even more stressful than snakehead shots.
It’s also a difficult shot, but you might get a few quick attempts at the same fish. And in the gourami case, if you make the money shot then you are likely to get an inspection. Not necessarily an eat however. But the shot is very difficult; too close and they blow up. Too far and they swim past it because they need to see little rings coming off the fly as a result of it landing. Try to do this by twitching the fly once and the Gourami simply disappears. (Which is very different to trout, where that can be a major tactic of course and it’s amazing that it doesn’t work here, but it also makes it harder... much harder!).
Consequently it’s an incredibly challenging shot. You can’t choose to wait for the perfect shot either because the fish are moving fast, randomly and can just disappear for no reason at all. So you need to take the shot you see. If the fish encounters the flyline or leader then it’s all over. And they are not easy to see. In the evening light there can be a lot of reflection so you only get windows into the lake. All in all it’s a recipe for extreme frustration!
And I love it! And I also love the fact that it’s completely different to snakehead fishing. Also there is more variety with gourami. With snakehead we have babies, freerisers, fish moving territory and hitting the banks, if that’s your thing.
With gourami we have morning Bankside shade, ants in flat calms in April mornings, termites every 17 years, fig feeders which are so far impossible, fish in leaf lanes, termites, eating algae off stumps (“stumpers”) and some other random shit where they appear in this dimension for about twenty to thirty seconds and then disappear for the next three months.
Leaf lanes is one of the quite fascinating and more consistent ones. Usually after a thunderstorm, if you can find a lane of leaves then you might find a gourami working it. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past two weeks. And no doubt will continue to do so until the snakehead freerisers begin properly, or the July snakehead babies appear which I’m expecting middle of next month.
I’m working on a few things and going to tie a few more flies as well. I want a four or five kilo gourami. They are territorial, so you can build a map of their zones and literally chase the same fish for months. These territories do change over time however. It’s an incredibly complicated game of fly fishing chess.
I’ve started swimming daily but don’t want to talk about it. Or even think about it :D
Have a great week!
Cheers, Paul