1986-1989 The Early Days - Luring at Marina Bay
1986 How it Began
I was still in Secondary One then, the year was 1986, and I had just bought my
first lightweight baitcasting outfit as well as a single Nilsmaster lure. So I
made my way down to a spot where I'd been having some years of luck with
Garoupas and Snappers on sawdust worms -- Marina Bay and the Esplanade Area.
9 AM. So, after a little fiddling with my new baitcaster, I made the first cast. Bird's Nest. My very first backlash caught me by surprise... so that's what the shopkeeper at Beach road was telling me about... so I took some time to clear the tangle (a backlash on 6 lb line is not that easy to clear you know?) and, standing at the water's edge, made my second cast. This time, although there was still a little Char Bee Hoon, the black and white Nilsie managed to land about 20 ft away (very near actually). So I quickly cleared the minor backlash and started a sink-and-draw retrieve like the one I'd been reading about (though I was using a floating lure). Anyway, only after a few cranks of the handle, I felt a distinct tug and I struck.
The fight was brief, but it still managed to attract the attention of a passing Caucasian tourist who saw me lifting a nice little Garoupa weighing around 300 grams out of the water. I was really pleased and amazed at the catch plus the way I caught it, so was the tourist, who promptly snapped my picture (the one you see above), asked for my address, and mailed me the photo... which is posted above.
By the way, I released that fish, and four more which I landed within an hour from the same spot. By 10 AM, I packed up and went home, afraid that I was pushing my luck a little too far, yet fully satisfied with my first lure-fishing cum catch & release expedition.
1988-1989
Those were the days I used to rush down to Marina
Bay
Although getting stuck was already a problem back then,
we had HUMAN LURE RETRIEVERS assigned for each particular day so that only one
person had to get wet... no doubt swimming and diving for our lures was a messy
and risky method (and I still don't know what made us do it time and time
again), it made the whole experience so much more enriching. BUT DON"T ASK
ME TO DO IT AGAIN!!! Nevertheless, those were damn good days man!!!
Lures are expensive...
... and in the past, although my
cousin Justin did tell me about the lure retriever back in the 80's, we had to
dive for our lures.
Of course the risks were there. Many a time I had cuts on my feet so long and
deep that I thought I would never survive; and sometimes our fingers got poked
and cut by the hooks on our lures as we groped in the murky water.
Once you dive beneath the surface, visibility is reduced to less than an
arm's length and you have nothing to guide you except the thin monofilament. You
just have to keep going down and down, following the line till you reach the
lure.
Normally a simple tug would do the trick. But the key point would be to get a
firm hold on the body of the lure, and then you pull hard. Sometimes the hooks
would straighten, sometimes the hooks would be so deeply embedded in thick ropes
that you had to bring the whole snagpile up, but the method ALWAYS worked.
$10 was a lot to me as a schoolboy back in the 80's and losing a lure often
meant we had to go without lunch during recess for a whole week so save up for
another lure. Maybe in retrospect, diving for lures was not such a bad idea
after all, it provided some excitement in itself and helped our machismo (to
some extent). So tell me, who do you know has taken the plunge in the Singapore
River or Marina Bay?
1988 - William, Boon Chee and Simon... with our Rapalas and Nilsmasters, and Raymond at Hock Heng telling us jokes... ah, those were the days!
