Shawn/ June 9, 2015/ Uncategorised/ 1 comments

Note: Woops. I seem to have forgot about this post. So here it is, more than a year later, finally coming out of Draft.

Like every other early start, there was much disdain for the alarm. To make matters worse, I had accidentally set my alarm half an hour earlier than intended, the aircon was on, and I couldn’t fall asleep at night.

So really, the day started the night before. Maybe I was excited. This was my second kayak trip away from Pasir Ris, and the first to be done using my own transport. My first trip away from Pasir Ris was to St John’s with a large group of Native owners. The fishing was poor but the experience was awesome.

Today’s trip was with Josh and Rick. I met Josh on one of my first kayak trips with my then newly purchased Mariner 10. The skies had only just opened and thunder and lightning was frequent, and I was hiding in the nearest ‘cove’ I could find. The ‘cove’ was really just a very tiny mangrove river near the bank. He asked if there was space for him and I ushered him in and we got to talking.

We loaded up our kayaks and Josh graciously gave me his ratcheting straps to tie the kayak down. I had originally planned to tie it down with 550 paracord.

Then we headed to Changi Village to get our bait.

As we were leaving, there was a slight scare as I noticed that the van was moving very slowly and was struggling. I was surprised that a relatively light kayak would weigh down my van so much. Fortunately, I quickly realised that it was because I had left my handbrake on. It happens.

When we arrived at the launch point carpark, I was slightly annoyed that Josh had managed to unload his kayak all by himself. Sure, his kayak was lighter and his car was much lower down and if I wanted to I could have unloaded my kayak myself (with some difficulty) but still, for all the benefits of the Natives and all the drawbacks of the Hobies, this was a biggie.

We eventually launched with all of us intially experiencing difficulty with the soft sand and masses of seaweed.

As Josh and Rick sped off with their proverbial hares to my proverbial tortoise (although the difference in speed was not that large; and we all know who won that race!), I decided to try my hand at umbrella sailing.

The wind was mild but it did give me a bit of a push.

The Hobies slowed down as we neared our first spot and all of us dropped our lines within minutes of each other.

Rick quickly opened up with a nice fingermark.

I had been to this area on my old inflatable before so only stayed there for a bit before drifting to where I had success before.

I hooked up a number of small fish including these Johnson’s Snappers within minutes.

I eventually hooked up a small fingermark. If you’ve been following this blog, check out how red my lifejacket used to be.

Josh eventually got in to the game as well with a few small openers.

Before he got this pretty seabass.

Then the skies started to sound their warnings so we made a beeline for the nearest shelter. When nearing the shelter, I saw some interesting structures on my fish finder. I dropped my line and caught some relatively large cuttlefish (photos later). I also lost what I think could’ve been a a fairly decent sized seabass.

When we were under the shelter, the rain seemed to stop advancing so after a short period of debate on what to do next, we made a beeline for shore.

We stopped of near the jetty to fish where again I saw some interesting structures. I let my line down and within seconds a fish was on though it was small. I rebaited my line and threw it down and again, another fish was on in seconds (photos later).

Running out of bait, we continued back to shore almost immediately after.

We did a basic rinse down of our kayaks at the launch site itself before loading our kayaks on our vehicles and heading to Watercross.

Unfortunately, the wet conditions and with the timing that we reached Watercross, the mozzies and sandflies were in full attack mode.

Fin.