Sakishima Trip – Day 3: Scouting round Iriomote Island

2013/12/302020/11/25

Weather has been wet and dark which was discouraging my dad to bother going out fishing. My very fast task was to convince him how comfortable the latest Gore-Tex wear is in bad weather. He had to walk through a path in forest to be confirm how the 21st century technology keep him dry and warm.

Game at the Estuary of Urauchi River

Then I had to show him how smooth the latest fishing tackle is these days. It took him a while to get used to the fishing gears of high response, for what he is accustomed to is old school slow response tackle which needed to be worked out much harder. When he got the idea, he caught a small needlefish as a starter after many years on non-fishing.

It was rather odd to teach my dad how to do fishing, for it was he who brought me into the world of fishing in the first place when I was little. I demonstrated by how different speed of line retrieval can attract different specimen, in this case, a baby-size giant trevally.

Game at the Small Estuary of Unknown River

Then we moved to different location after picking up car-for-hire where it’s not far from where we could have local meal. It turned out to be an ideal place for prolonged hours of fishing, because we could go back and forth between the fishery and the carpark to get comfortable when rain was too hard. My dad took lure tackle and I took fly tackle for this venue to test how fish under current condition would react.

There was a school of blacktail snappers hovering between saltwater and brackish water. I tried to lure them into biting my fly, but they show a little interest. First fish went to my dad on gold/pink spoon whose vertical action gave them something to bite on.

I caught a barracuda on the side of sea on a shiny minnow pattern while trying hard to make the snappers into bite. In a meantime, my dad kept catching snappers with spoon which seemed to be creating enough commotion and attraction worth attacking. And then, out of blue, I caught a good old sub-tropical friend: tille treavally.

This fish must be hiding near rock or mangrove and only came out when fly was retrieved in high speed. I was trying to retrieve as slow as possible, so the complex current created in estuary must be adding lot more acceleration to fly than expected. I need a new fly that doesn’t swim too fast, but make “dancing" to attract snappers.

Overall, fishing was very slow by local standard. Consecutive rainy days had lowered the temperature of freshwater coming out of island’s interior while saltwater from ocean stays mildly warm turning off those fish who usually attack more aggressively. To my standard of fishing in winter condition, it is good enough fishing though.

Result on Lure

Needlefish x 1
Brassy trevally x 1
Blacktail snapper x 3

Result on Fly

Great barracuda x 1
Tille trevally x 1

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