In October 2009, I chartered a boat for (what turned out to be) a sucessful solo Malaysian Sailfish expedition.

Armed with photos of the 2009 trip and details of an Air Asia sale, it didn't take much convincing to get my mate Dale and brother Sean (not normally a fisherman) to agree to get on board for the 2011 jaunt.

We arrived in KL and drove down to Kuala Rompin to meet our guide Captain Lam (the man to see for charters in Asia). He warned us that it had been a slow start to the season, and a particularly slow August.

Still it was great to get away, and I had a new combo that I wanted to test out, which was much lighter than what I'd used in 09, and to date had not caught a fish. I was running a Stella 5000SW on a PE3 Yamaga Blanks Blue Sniper 65/3, and this ended up being the only combo I used for the trip.

The first day lived up to Lam's warning, the fishing was incredibly slow - even the livebait hunting. Sean, concerned he might never get a decent fish photo, got us to take this pic of him holding the beast that took him hours to subdue :-)

Finally though, my rod took off and we had got our first run. Much to my dismay it turned out to be a 'Singapore Marlin' (Long Tom) rather than the Saily I'd hoped for. Still, the combo was blooded.

Unfortunately this was to be our only fish of the day, and we made our way back to land for some much needed consolation beers. The trip was half over, but we were hopeful that things would improve on day 2.

The weather conditions on day 2 turned out to be even better than the first day, certainly beating the Perth winter. We steamed out of port to try some new bait catching ground, unfortunately it didnt pay off. After spending a couple of hours for limited results, we motored to the ground from day 1 with an empty livewell. Thankfully, the fishing gods smiled on us shortly after we got back to the original ground. We loaded up on liveys and sent one out, and it wasnt long until Dale had a hit. After a solid fight he landed his first billie, also blooding a new combo. The curse of the trip had been lifted.

A bit of time passed and finally my rod went off again. I thought the combo would finally get a saily, but again I was wrong. A short fight ended in this Cobia - which was my first, so not overly disappointing, and good on the table that night.

At long last though my time came. We saw a sailfish finning around the baloons and my rod took off. The fight was on. We could see from the start that it was a solid fish and it certainly gave me some grief, but after a long fight with some tense moments when line capacity was tested, some careful manouevering by the skipper and plenty of spool palming, we landed this nice sail. Definitely my PB, and the biggest that our guide had pulled this year.

Sean was up next, hooking onto another Cobes. As you can see he decided to get intimate with it, but in fairness he had just spent 4 weeks on a rig.

The action remained hot for the rest of the day, with the next strike resulting in a double hookup. Both fish were landed.

Dale was up next landing another solid saily, with me finishing up with one more before we retired for beers back on land (thankfully - this time they were beers of celebration). We ended up with 6 sails from 6 strikes for the day, which is a much better strike rate than the previous year. All sails were cleanly hooked, and released succesfully.

Some of the fish got very aerobatic, which certainly got the heart pumping. I look forward to getting back there again - next mission is to get one on stickbait!

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