My 13 day Thai fishing adventure (day five)

[SIMPLE MAN]

Jules turns up 10 mins early this morning and bless him he waits while i have a quick ciggy 20 min later we are back at Cha Am but this time on the main lake,Its hot this morning there's no clouds and i think its going to be a scorcher,They do have some open sided roofed shelters with table and chairs behind most of the swims 20ft or so but because today i am float fishing only 15ft out they are not much use unless you want a break from the fishing and the sun,Jules returns from the site shop with a tin of chilled coffee it might sound strange but in fact is really nice he also has my bait which is a loaf of bread,he also has several bags of fermented bread which i thought smelled really nice,he emptied 4-5 of these bags into a very large mixing bowl added a few flavours and now i am all set for a days gudgeon bashing(well that's what it felt like)a hand full of the ground bait bread mix thrown out 12-15ft a small pole float set at about 8ft and just a small pinch of bread on the hook.For the first couple of hours there was hundreds of sawai catfish 2-5lb rising all over and around my swim and Jules said it was very strange that i had not hooked a good few of them but all i was getting was 4-8oz tilapia and some sort of barb fish in the 1-2oz bracket there was also some strange little blighters that shot up from the bottom of the lake took a gulp of air squeaked and disappeared back down in to the depths,I did catch 3 of these weird little critters all about 8-10oz Jules said they called them sucker fish,when handled they had no slime on them at all ,but were really bony or covered by armoured plating .



It was getting on for mid-day and i had covered my rather white legs with a towel when my float shot under i struck my first thought was Gahore which sadly it wasn't but after 9-10 min i had a catala carp to the net of 14lb to be honest it was a bit of a ugly so and so but i knew that the ground bait was starting to attract the bigger fish into the swim and although very hot it gave me a real boost



The next 45min was back to the tilapia bashing i even managed a couple of bright pink ones which although were tilapia Jules called them something else (sorry guys but i forgot to write the name down) I then caught a carp species called aesop of 8lbs , this probably is not the correct spelling but it is how its pronounced and to honest to say i caught it some how doesn't seem right,you see i was sitting at the bank rod in hand when splash i nearly jumped out of my seat, this thing was 2ft out of the water with my hook in its mouth running off like a steam train and after 20 seconds it just lay on its side and came in like a wet rag ,this certainly was no fish for any one with a nervous disposition (crazy) Jules said that was typical of that species and for the next half hour i was holding the rod a lot tighter



About a hour or so later i had another catala of 10lb and then about 4.30 my float slid under and i struck in to what i thought was a nice fish but it stopped running about a third of the way out and Jules said if it was a Gahore it wouldn't of stopped until it had reached the far bank,It still gave me a fine battle and about 12min later i had what turned out to be my last fish of the day a cracking catala of 18lb



So i hadn't caught my Gahore (Siamese carp) but had had another great days fishing and couldn't wait to get back to the hotel for a well deserved shower and a few chang beers
And before i close this episode i would like to say thank you to geejavy for his help so i can now post photos with my tale
Regards Simple

[MRG2000]

The wierd sucker fish are Plecostumus i think ....smaller species are often found in home aquariums ...

[SIMPLE MAN]

Yes m8 years ago i had one myself in one of my aquariums but i didnt want to try and spell it