Gone Fishing February 19, 2006
Posted by Martin in : Uncategorized , trackbackA group of Thailand’s gemology elite spent a full day out on the outskirts of Bangkok at a fishing lake. This lake is man-made and is full of catfish. This was the second occasion I’ve been fishing – the first was a year ago in Koh Si Chang. This time we had two private fishing huts between our group of six and we were taking this sport seriously.
We had two Thai fishing assistants who cast the lines out and organized out bait for us. Our job was to wait for the fish to bite and to skillfully reel the blighters in.
In Koh Si Chang our catches were little more than the size of our feet whereas today our target catch exceeded 25 kilos. There’s a hell of a lot of effort required to reel in something so powerful. The skill is to tire the fish out which, considering the animal is built to spend its life moving around in the water is not such an easy task. These bastards pull like hell and our job is to get them pulling to the left and right so that they eventually exhaust themselves and resist less when it comes to reeling them into our net.
The odds were stacked in our favor yet the fish didn’t make our life especially easy. They were experienced enough to know how to tangle themselves in the support beams to escape. That said we reeled in all but a few of the catches.
Catfish are not particularly tasty fish so we released them back into the waters again. It must be a pretty horrific life for these poor creatures. They spend most of their day eating bread, getting a hook through their lip, struggling like mad for as long as 30 minutes in the assumption that they are not likely to see the afternoon. Finally exhausted and on the verge of death they are hauled onto land, have a camera flashed at them as they are placed into a fisherman’s arms and then thrown back into the water to repeat the cycle.
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