India

[Bobj]

Excellent posts, Ken L. The barra boof is something to behold......and feel through the side of an aluminium boat.

The 'hooks in fingers' is acommon threat where barra are concerned.... Wait till you get a 50 lb barra smashing everything around and you stuck on the other end of the lure........Dunnit make the eyes water :yucky:

[Tony U]

I am sitting here at my desk wincing at the pain just thinking about it. Dont Bass Pro or such like do a hook removal kit for such emergencies I saw one of the US fishing programmes recommending one a few years back?

 

 

Tony

[Ken L]

I've done it before at home and had to push the hook through my big toe nail which was eyewatering stuff but this was a fist with a live fish attached to the other hooks.

Funny thing about pain, it's always far worse when you don't know how much worse it's going to get. Having been there and done that, I found myself almost completely shut off from the pain and just got on with the job of sorting it out - there is some impressive local bruising forming now though.

 

Best of it is that I've just found out that having delivered me home, Angelo went straight back out to try to catch some more and was there until 4.30am - although he still caught nothing.

[Ken L]

I've just finished another five days on the Cauvery, and what a spectacular five days it's been.

5 wild elephants including a baby came down to the far bank of the river to drink and play and I stood watching them from the bank for ten minutes before going back to the cottage and letting them finnish doing their thing.

I saw a total of three snakes. Two small ones in the river swimming and another in the tallons of an eagle that was taking it to feed to it's chicks up in a mango tree on the far side of the river. I didn't see a single snake on the bank or in the paddies though which makes a change from last year when the place was crawling with them.

I met up with a couple of guys that I only know from internet forums (Steve Locket and Bopanna) and had the oppertunity to fish with them which was nice. And the fishing.......

For the guys that will be meeting up in India next January, I have to tell you that I've upped the bar just a tad !

In addition to another 3 twenties and plenty of doubles, I caught what I've been told was:

The biggest fish ever taken from the stretch by a visiting angler.

The biggest fish taken by anybody for more than 15 years.

and

The biggest lure caught fish since 1980 !

After being heartbroken about pricking but not hooking up to a fish estimated at 25lb on the fly (I still haven't bagged a mahseer on the fly rod), I switched to a lure rod and moved a little way downstream to fish a rock bar where I'd previously been smashed up. On the second cast, the rod hooped over and I was connected to a beast that seemed detirmined to show me the meaning of raw visceral power. It towed the boat, me and the anchor up and down the river and for 10 minutes and even when it stopped. I struggled to recover any line or lift it and got just an occasional view of a big grey tail beating back and forth.

Eventually, it came up and I was waiting with the net but took one look and chucked the net asside because there was no way this beastie was going in.

I grabbed the lower jaw instead and dropped a stringer through after a quick peek to make sure I wasn't going to get hooked up as I did it.

The other end of the stringer is tied off to my leg and an open knife left next to me in case Mr Croc takes a fancy to my fish)

I then towed the fish into the bank (sometimes, it towed me) and sorted out the weigh sling, camera, scales etc before running into a problem - the fish was so big that I couldn't pick it up !

After repositioning the weigh sling next to the river, I finaly got an arm under the fish and managed to lift it a couple of inches clear of the water and onto the wet sling without dragging her over any rocks. Once in the sling, I could lift her on the the lifting ropes and could handle things a bit more easily. The weight ?

Well my scales came down to 77 pounds and 6 oz !

Take off the 6oz for the weight of the sling and the marker to beat is now 77lb even.

In full acordance with Sods law, I'd had Steve and his camera's in the coracle with me all morning and this fish hit just half an hour after going back out alone in the afternoon. As a consequence, I gave the camera to a local and asked him to fire of a dozen or so shots rather than waste time setting up the tripod. Out of the dozen photo's, not one is good and only two actually show both me and the fish - there's a lesson there somewhere.

 

I just rolled back into Goa after something like 22 hours of travelling and was greated with a stunning partial eclipse that occurred just after sunrise and could be viewed with the naked eye without glare.

I also have the guys telling me that the barramundi are going crazy after the recent spell of hot whether so things is looking good for the next few days.

[Clifftop]

77lbs WOW.

another good read Ken well done.

[Ken L]

I got out to the river late last night with a new trick up my sleave. Instead of the usual 60lb mono leader, I'd decided to start off with a 20lb flourocarbon leader (almost invisible in use becaue it's refractive index is very similar to that of saltwater) and see if this offered ay advantages.

There were more people on the beach than I've ever see (I counted 22) but predictably, they were all crowded shoulder to shoulder o the point of the spit. The tide was still comming in so I decided to fish the eddy on the inside of the river where I could have a bit of space and clipped on a 4" swimshad.

 

I blasted it out, let it sink down a bit and sarted the retrieve. I was idly wondering whether I'd get away with just a 20lb leader (it's suposed to be more abrasion resistant than mono) when the rod slamed over half way through the first cast.

It was ovbiously a big fish so I slackened off the clutch and just let it go (I've now decided that ou get less crazy jumping and thereforeless trown hooks if you encourage the fish to run a couple of times against a fairly light drag so that it tires itself out) and it did exactly what I wanted, powering off arround the eddy.

 

As I started to gain some line back, there where a couple of headshakes and a single clear of the water jump in the moonlight followed by another where she just stuck her head out.

There was a final run when she banged her head against the dropoff where the tide had cut away the sand and then she was done. I bought her up on a wave, ran over and held her to the sand as the wave retreated and pushed her up the beach on the next wave - getting soaked in the process because she decided to give me a tail assist.

Clearly she was a good fish and latter she would pull the scales down to 9.08kg.

When i saw the weight, I re-set the scales to imperial just to check my metal calculation and re-weighed. Sure enough, a little over 20lb, my new PB barra and Possibly the vindication of my experiment.

The plastic lure had been destroyed and on checking the line, there were a couple of little cuts that would have corresponded to the position of the razor sharp edges of the gill covers which explained the "pings" I'd felt through the line during the fight.

I re-tied the clip above the cuts and got ready to fish again. Predictably there were now 6 people fishing where there had previously been just me but the tide was turning and there was now nobody fishing the seaward eddy.

 

Half an hour after moving the tide had started to run out and I'd changed from a swimshad to a 6" Bomber "Long A" lure and there was a tap where I know there are no sandbars to run into. I slammed the hooks home and the rod looped over as another fish went streaming off. The same tactics worked perfectly (two jumps this time) but with more tide, it took longer to subdue the fish. As this one came up the beach, it was almost the double of the first one and would latter weigh in at 8.7kg's (19lb), so I would have beaten my previous PB with either fish.

On checking the line, there was no indication of any damage but by the time I had put the fish safely up the beach I turned arround to find that once again there had been a migration of my fellow anglers and I couldn't get near where I had been fishing.

 

I ranged the beach and river for a while before deciding to fish the ain run for a while. I have an advantage here because I can outrange all of the locals bu a good 20, even when throwing little 4" baits so I can reach the slightly deeper water where the mangrove Jacks hold out at that sstage of the tide. After a couple of casts, wham and I was into a little thug of a fish that fought like a barra of two or three times its size that came in after a minute of so. Several more bites were had but predictably, most of them were jacks grabbing the tails of the baits and I had no ore hookups.

 

I'm now an official flourocarbon convert, although I might up the strength to 30 or even 35lb for future trips, just to give myself a wider safety margin. I only saw two other fish landed, Angelo lost one when a hook straigtened and Ashok didn't have a bite despite both now using mono leaders. Sure, some of it will come down to my increased range but I reckon flouro is the way to go and if I get chance to try it on UK bass this summer, I will.

[Tony U]

Ken

I have been using heavy duty mono as my rubbing leader so I will follow your example on my next tropics trip (in May). Which fluorocarbon were you using, Seagur?

 

 

Tony

[Ken L]

Flouro was Ocean Master extreem from BassPro.

 

Just got asked the exact same question on IndianAngler.com

[Ken L]

Well, this trip is all but over and I fly to Delhi this afternoon and back to Europe on the 8th.

I've been catching some lovely Mangrove jacks upto about 5lb but the Barra really haven't kicked off for some reason.

I've been driving locals mad by releasing undersized fish to fight another day and preaching the gospel of self imposed slot limits (releasing the undersized and the very big) but I fear

that it'll fall on deaf ears.

Last night was my last night on the river and I celebrated by catching my first Flathead on a lure (a bartailed flathead) and a moderatly sized Mangrove jack that will be lunch.

 

The unwillingness to release the babies (and some of the barra I've seen taken were just that) is definatly part and parcel of the Indian mindset. It may be a gross generalisation but there seems to be no thought for tomorrow at all.

If I take these baby fish today, I have a feed but if i release them, somebody else will catch them and anyway, there will always be fish for tomorrow.....

If I have a tasty sweet paan and toss the plasic wrapper on the floor, I have a nice taste in my mouth and no nasty plastic to carry - so what if I have to live in sh1t for the next 10 years because my village is covered in waste plastic.....

Ah well, I supose they'll learn eventually - probably when they're thigh deep in plastic with no fish to eat.

Thankfully, there are a few (a very few) people here that are starting to wake up.

 

Good things comming home (appart from memories and photos) are some Kashmiri chillies (Great for Chill Con Carni), dried prawns and almost 6kg's of shirts and shorts that have been bought here, including Hugo Boss shirts (not fakes) for 200 RS each - that's less than 3 quid !

Fortunatly, I'm leaving a lot of lead and rubber shad type lures and other stuff behind so hopefully I'll not be to far over my weight limits...

 

Future posts will hopefully detail some fish caught in the UK - if I can remember how !

[Ken L]

I know it's been a while but I did promis to post a few photo's.

 

We started off fishing in the Andaman Islands and I met up with Soren from Denmark to catch GT's, Bluefin Trevelly, Coral Trout, Tiger Grouper and Green Jobfish.