Fishing Report: Cha-am.
Cha-am was somewhat of a surprise as it is a major Thai holiday destination. If you use Google Earth, you can spot the jetty I will be talking about. After Songkhla, Cha-am was second fishiest place that I have been in regards to other people fishing. Asians like fishing and it is a popular sport. I wasn’t thinking about it until I saw the hundreds of people out fishing up and down the beaches.
Cha-ams layout is pretty basic. The tourist area is pretty much based on the single beach road. The fishing area consists of three areas. At the far end which is where the fishing port is located is a very nice jetty. When you reach the tourist restaurant area you make a right at the end of the road and take the little dirt road to the jetty. With a motorbike you can drive virtually to the end.
The second is the entire beach area. Now, this is your basic surf fishing and I don’t think that there is anything great or different going on here as the other thousand kilometers of similar beach front areas, but as I had stated before a lot of people were enjoying their time at the beach doing some fishing as well as the usual beach fun.
The third area is at the opposite end where there looked to be some more veteran local guys who came out in the evenings all set up for a night of fishing at a kind of sea wall. It looked like they were preparing to fish the incoming tide and were kitted up with some healthy rigs so apparently some big fishies can be caught.
I ended up fishing the jetty which was one of the better layouts that I have seen. As the picture shows it is a fairly long jetty which goes out pretty far. The jetty is made up of really large boulders which create a lot of deep eddies. These eddies seem to be fairly productive as a lot of locals were just using cane poles with floats to pull up a variety of perches and mullets. My first evening I just spent checking out the area. It was on a Sunday when I arrived and as I was making my way out to the jetty, groups of guys were loading up their trucks with some really heavy duty rigs. That was very promising as I hadn’t seen hardware like that since leaving Songkhla. Passing all the cane polers I reached the end and saw that there was a very strong tide and the water looked to be very deep. The boulders were loosely piled so there were a lot of pocket areas for cover. I noticed again a bunch of schools of mullets gliding in and out of the eddies searching for food. While just hanging out observing I noticed a chunk of bread which had been floating in one eddie. As the tide rose, some of the mullets entered the pool and then soon a school was attacking the bread chunk. That was educational and gave me a good idea. Later as the sun was setting, bigger pelagics moved in and there were some large Barracudas jumping and some pretty big swirls around the end of the jetty. It looked to be a very nice area for my kind of fishing.
The next evening I was out with my stuff ready to give it a go. My plan was to live bait rig some mullet and swim them under a float the same way I did in Songkhla. Had I had a cast net, catching bait wouldn’t have been an issue, but without one getting a mullet was looking dire. After seeing the mullet attacking the bread ball, I decided to give the old fashion bread and hook a try. I remember the fly fishing guy telling me about how they used a piece of white yarn to imitate bread, but I figured a trip to 7-11 and a loaf of the real stuff would work even better. I used my spinning rod which was longer and had the more sensitive braided line. To the braided line I attached a five foot section of the thinnest leader I had. To that the smallest hook I had. I waited until the tide came in and when the pool was accessible I started to throw out bits of bread. It was a short while later that a school came in and started to feed on the bread. It took a few tries to get it right but finally I got it so a nice hefty Mullet grabbed the bread and I had him hooked. Now, this was a pretty hefty 8” mullet and after hooking it up to my big rig and tossing it out, it caught the attention of some local guys who were pitching live shrimp. They gave me the thumbs up and grabbed their thighs a sign which I am assuming means fishing for a big fish the size of your leg. I floated that Mullet around until night fall without a bite, but again there were big fish around, but when fishing for the big stuff, it takes time and luck. I tried a couple of evenings, but not willing to put in a late night, I ended up with nothing but a good attempt. Still had a lot of fun though and learned something new so it wasn’t a total loss.
Tags: 1, Thailand