Mackerel Buster!

Pictures below contributed by our fellow angler, Nur Iman. He used trolling technique and Wolf Herring or "ikan parang" as baits. In total Nur Iman and Co. caught around six mackerels on that day off the coast of Belait.

East Brimfield Reservoir

Finally, we are out on the boat!!! This past Friday Bob and I took the boat out to fish and we had a great day for early spring. The air temp. was in the mid 70'sF. and the water was about 60F. and the bass are moving up in preparation to spawn making them very aggressive. We started the day around 1:30 pm, after I got out of work and only got one bass on a deep diving crank until about 4:30 pm.
We were on the NW shore of the lake working into some shallow coves, the shoreline was steep and the bottom dropped off fast. We were throwing medium diving crank baits and started to get hit just into early evening. The first fish were smaller males, but they hit the lures as soon as they landed, and we went from one fish to 3 or 4 in about 30 minutes.
The fish began hitting fast and hard when the sun began to lower. Bob with a good spring male bass.
As the afternoon went on we started to see a mix of females, some we were able to land, some we lost. We think this was due to the fact that the fish may not have been hungry, but made aggressive and prone to snap due to the warm weather and impending spawn, so they did not hook up on the lures as well as if they meant to eat them.
In the mix Bob caught a good size Yellow Perch, a very tasty species, though they only get up to about 2lbs. They are a tenacious fish for their size and will hit lures even larger than themselves.
One of the lures Bob used, a medium diver Xcaliber fat free guppy. This was the star lure of the day as it caught the most fish. they are, like most crank baits easy to use. They are cast to the desired location, then retrieved steadily fast or slow sometimes stopping to let the lure float up momentarily, and when possible running the plastic lip into rocks and wood to make noise. Bob added a twist by letting the bait sit on the surface after it landed and twitching it, with the bass in their mood they would strike the bait without needing to reel it in.
I caught most of my fish on this bait, a Mann's -4 crank bait with a steady slow retrieve. The lure swims at about 4 ft. below the surface and has a great wobbling action that made the fish hit.
Bob with another nice fish. We definitely had the best day of fishing so far out of the four we have spent on the water, we lost count after a dozen fish and were it not for failing daylight and falling temps (it's not summer yet) we could have kept catching for longer. This will be the first in what I hope to be many positive accounts of fishing both local and out of state waters, and the lures we used to bag them. Until next time, God bless and keep fishing! Mike Z.

14th April Catch Report

Out total catch for that day was 70 over kg. We tried three different types of fishing techniques, ie. bottom fishing, using "tabur" (not sure what's the name in English...hehehe) & trolling. We caught alot of "kerisi bali" and red snappers using both the bottom and "tabur" techniques but unfortunately we didn't catch any using the trolling technique which was intended mainly for mackerel.

...:: Nice big red fish..called the "Pantaran" ::...

...:: A 3.5kg "kerisi bali" ::...

...:: A 2.5kg red snapper ::...