Paul Arden | Tuesday, 28 December 2021
The end of the year is coming in fast! The fishing is pretty hot here in Malaysia right now. Sure we are in middle of the Wet Season, but the rain is giving us a distinct break. This is one of the times of the year that Giant Snakehead spawn (they spawn and then within about 24 hours the eggs hatch. Both adults proceed to protect their young for the next 10-12 weeks). The other Prime Time for babies is late March through April.
When the babies are at their smallest, then the fishing is most certainly easier — as about a dead cert as you can get around here — not that that is saying much, because it’s still highly challenging! Usually I pass all this stuff over to my guests, because it’s the best introduction to fly fishing for “The King of the Lake Jungle” that you can get. However we don’t have guests and haven’t had all bloody year! Consequently Ashly and I will just have to set about them ourselves :))) Bring it on!!!
These past three years, I’ve really been working on techniques. I’ve had two challenges. The first has been to turn “chasers into takers” and the second has been to turns “eats into hook-ups”. Turning chasers into takers was solved by adding “frog legs” to our poppers. We starting doing this earlier in the year and there is no question now, that it has solved that particular problem.
Turning eats into actual hookups has been a real problem. My first approach was to tie a tandem hook with the trailing hook inverted. However even this monstrosity-of-a-fly (Lars would love it) missed fish (I have no idea how) but after I had the problem of both hooks penetrating both top and bottom of the mouth of one unfortunate fish, I gave the idea up as a bad job.
Next, I tried a “dislocated” popper. The popper head slid along the wire, with the tail tied to a mono loop and both tail and the hook being tied through the loop knot. Gary Meyer put me on to this concept. Better for sure, but the resulting fly was simply “too aerodynamic” and with the exposed hook it would often land hard, sometimes spooking fish. It was also noticeably more difficult to change direction of the fly during the cast.
A more recent move on my part, was to wait an incredibly long time (at least five seconds, which feels like an eternity when you’re in the heat of the moment…) and then striking. I tried striking with the rod, as well as by strip setting with the line hand, as then with both: none of which was anywhere near the answer!
However… waiting an even longer amount of time (six seconds :p but it could be longer; it’s difficult to tell exactly, especially since Snakehead Eats actually slow time) and then… slowly increasing-the-pressure [to rock solid], has resulted in an almost 100% success rate and (perhaps surprisingly) all these latest fish have been hooked in the lips and not deeply hooked —as I feared might happen with this technique.
The combination of these two changes in my approach, I believe, may actually have resulted in more than doubling my catch rate…. which makes it all a VERY significant improvement indeed. (I always say it takes 3000 days to learn a type of fishing and I’m still not there yet!). I’m very fish hungry at the moment to really set about them to see if I’m right. Because if so, then I’m going to be smelling of fish all the time!
As a side note, I think what most people don’t realise about this fishing, is how much hunting and stalking of these fish goes on here, but that’s another FP subject — and maybe I’ll even have a video to show you next week too. Much of the casting angles apply to all fish.
Anyway, for the remainder of this year, we are heading out to one of my favourite parts of the lake. I’m not entirely sure we have enough petrol to get back, which will make life interesting, but I’ll worry about that when it happens! (Ashly doesn’t know that part yet). It will be awesome to be fishing down there again (it’s a two and a half hours boat ride each way). We haven’t visited this part of the lake in months, but when it’s hot, man, it’s really hot!
Hopefully, when I’m back, we will have the loan of a white water raft for five days, to see if this is the right approach to proceed with for Sungai Tiang. If it is, then I’ll chase either sponsorship or funding. They are not cheap, at around 5K USD a pop! But if two people can pull one raft (and gear) upstream, then I think this is undoubtedly the best approach.
I also have a new Hot Torpedo to release! We are going to take pre-orders on this rod. I expect that come April we are going to have a long waiting list. So it makes sense to start one now!
More on this and other thoughts next week. Have a fantastic New Year’s Eve!! Ashy and I will have a campfire to see in the New Year. Hopefully next year we’ll have guests at this time of year, or maybe we will be in Europe — we shall see. One thing is for sure; this is a fantastic time to be fishing Belum-Temenggor!
Thank you to all of our wonderful FP writers, HT owners, Board members and all of our readers. I’m wishing you a very very happy, prosperous and smelling-of-fish 2022! Bring it on!!!!
Cheers, Paul