2014年9月29日月曜日

Fun arium @ Suk soi 26

I can't go fishing every weekend because of my family. I have to take care of them.
I didn't ask them to come to Thailand, but they did. Well, my son visited me last summer from Japan, and it was his first oversea's travel. We went fishing, went to swim at the ocean, went to some other fun places, and he liked 'em all. So, after he and my wife went back to Japan and a couple of weeks later, he called me and said, "I am gonna move to Bangkok." To a 8 year old boy who doesn't speak English or Thai, moving to Thailand is a huge commitment and experience. He doesn't like spacy food, but he liked this warm weather and good ol' fruits and stuff. He liked fishing, too. So, he decided it.

I admire that. And I decided, too. I wanna go fishing every weekend, but if he (or maybe my wife) asks me to take them to anywhere, I go out with them.
You think it's normal? Do you think an angler like me wants to go shopping with a woman who doesn't buy a thing but look around all day without a plan, and I am comfortable with it? Hell no!! But I keep my mouth shut and go out with her although I don't want to, because I wanna go fish.

Anyway, Bangkok is not the best city to raise children. No park, no playground, no soccer fields or anything for kids to play at. I mean NOTHING. There are a couple of parks in Bangkok. One park is 5 minutes from my condo, but it's no ground to play around. Just trees and running spots to go around. Another park is just a big pond and a walk way around it. The largest park is currently occupied by people who participated Coup d'etat. They live there with camping tents...

Thanks to my condo. They have a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a kid's playground so that kids can play, but not at every condo.

Thus, how do kids, especially my son, discharge their enery? We go to Fun arium.
http://www.funarium.co.th/


It's an indoor playground. In Japan, we have Aeon Fantasy. There is Aeon Fantasy in Bangkok, too. But they are small, and my son says not fun at all. Therefore, we choose to go to Fun arium.
There are a huge and complicated jangle jim, basketball court, bicycling field, rock climbing walls, cooking studio, drawing studio, and many things. Kids at Fun arium run around all the time look extremely excited.

Food over there is not bad at all. This day I ate a Thai traditional noodle. The stuff asked me "spacy or not spacy". I ordered spacy one. What happended is I had a stomachache until late night....

I wish Bangkok government produces a park for kids, only for kids. 

Wines supplied

One of my stuff whose brother owns a bar in J-Avenue in Thong lo, Bangkok, brought wines for me, actually for my wife because she knows my wife loves drinking wines. If I didn't prohibit her to drink wines too much, she'd drink a bottle per day. Well, think about it how much it costs to drink a bottle every day.... Anyway, my stuff brings bottles of wines for me from time to time. Of course, I pay. 

This time she brough:
Villavelvedere Chardonnay Delle Venezie(Italian)x 2 bottles

Momentos Cabernet Sauvignon (Argentina)x 1 bottle
 
Coli Chianti Classico (Italian)x 1 bottle
The total price for this time was 1200 baht, but I still don't know whether this was the retail price or the cost. She says "I got new wines for you, there you go. 1200 baht" with her hand to pay at this moment. I laughed and paid.... but her brother's bar is located at the center of the most expensive and fashionable area. Therefore, I don't think it was a retail price.

Well, either way, I shold pass the bottles to my wife and ask the taste.

2014年9月25日木曜日

Lates is effective to Barramundi

In Bangkok, Thailand, it looks like the whole year is summer and warm, but it’s not. We don’t have 4 seasons, but we have a dry season from November to March, a hot season from April to May, then June to September is the rainy season. 3 seasons in a year. The coldest day I experienced last year was in December; it was 17 degrees in the morning. It was too cold, so that I couldn’t get out of my bed. The hottest day I experienced was in May. It was probably over 40 degrees. I only walked a 100 meter to go to lunch, but I sweated like a waterfall.

Anyway, for barramundi fishing, when the rainy season gets closer to its end, the rain temperature declines, then the water temperature decreases as well. Men don’t feel the rain temperature much, but fish does. Surface water temperature gets lower, and barra start to cruise on the bottom in the morning instead of chasing baitfish on the surface.
And many Thai locals start casting tiny tiny plastic worms like a crappie worm and challenging themselves to catch 5 kg barra or bigger.

To me, this is the most difficult time of the year to fish barramundi due to the unstable water temperature. And sometimes the water looks like it had a fall turn over. Everyone says there is no fall in Thailand especially in Bangkok, but the nature proved. There it is.
Once we get this bad unstable weather, barra stop biting. Even local super technique, little bitty worms don’t get a bite. On the other hand, there is a lure that triggers many bites; Lates (Megabass).



It only dives 30cm deep with the steady retrieve. Because it obtains the strong buoyancy, it floats up the surface really quick when stops reeling. In this time of year, barra stay in the deeper range and not move around much, but no jerking, no twitching, just retrieving the bait like a crankbait, barra attack the lure intensely.

I like the way Lates rolls its body. Nothing wiggles like it.

So, the day I had many bites with Lates, some Thai guys came to ask me what I was throwing. No one understood why fish bit although it was an easy day. In the very next week, it was so difficult to fish again, but Lates only worked.

2014年9月24日水曜日

Crankbaits and Barramundi

I have been fishing lure-fishing-predators over 30 years, especially black bass. I follow up bass fishing professional tournaments, read magazines, speak to experts and gather up information to catch bass for years, but fishing barramundi was a bit different from bass. Therefore, I got to learn it from zero because I couldn’t find good ol’ barramundi fishing technique reports much, especially not in my native tongue.

So, I had to imagine how barramundi behaves like and stuff, using my bass fishing knowledge.

For the first barramundi fishing trip I had in Thailand, I brought many jerk baits, lipless baits, and crank baits which were my frontline hard baits, and any predators shall bite at anywhere.

But NO BITES on cranks by barra!

I challenged to cast the baits in the past one year but no response from the fish. When I caught a barra then another came, due to their behavior, there should be a school of them. I changed my bait to a crank and tried but no bite on it. Then, switched it to something else, there came another bite…
All the fish I caught on crankbaits were catfish and snakehead.

There was one time I caught a barramundi on the crankbait. It was a DD-22 (Norman). However, it was like I cranked my reel handle once, and it bit on the lure. Thus, to me, it was a reaction bite that barra had to bite; it could bite on anything.

From my short period of the experience of fishing barramundi, I believe they don’t like “too much wobbling” baits. For the jerkbaits, I think they prefer to bite on the tighter rolling action types than wider wobbling types.
But I am still testing many kinds of actions for barra. I will updates info on crankbaits v.s. barra sometime later.

Introduction

I am Japanese who has happened to live in Bangkok, Thailand since July of 2013 due to my business. It’s been about a year to encourage myself to write a blog. In this day and age, I would use social media such as facebook to post my memos and pictures, but I don’t want to be connected to too many people I know. I determined to write stuff to keep up my memories in a little detail way instead; thus, I needed a blog for myself.

What I am gonna write in my blog is about fishing, food, and all the things I see in my life in Bangkok. I try to state about fishing more than a lifestyle in Thailand because I wanna keep my fishing memos in here.