Sembawang Park

Today, I added another tick to my lifespan. To celebrate this, it would be very nice to get a barra. It had eluded me all this time. Tide was to be around 2pm and I didn't feel like running far. After D's swimming, I thought it would be good to spend an early afternoon at Sembawang Park. I went there early around 10am and had the good luck to get a bench. A would pack lunch and we would fish till around 2pm and head for some other activity to mark this occasion.



So reaching there, I realized that I had forgotten my rod stand. So, not much choice but to "borrow" the rubbish bin as a support. I could only use 1 rod like this, and I rigged up the big 9 footer. Tide was slowly creeping up and the place got more crowded towards the afternoon. I was shooting out leftover live prawns from my previous night batch, but all the while, nothing at all. Sometimes, upon pulling back the line, the prawns would be half eaten. Likely to be the work of crabs.



There was some kind of shipping operation going on. A boat came over to drag some metal containers over to the shipyard. Luckily, my line was not in the way.

A chinese and a malay man came and parked themselves on my right. Chinese man was using a simple rig with small hooks and he managed to get a tiny bait fish. For the whole session, that was the only fish I had seen. The malay was more pro. I chatted with him later and found out that he was using a Holiday spin with a Biomaster 8000. The biomaster was impresseive. His rod could cast pretty far, some 100 metres away. He was using dead sotong as baits. Seeing his setup, I was very tempted to get hold of my surfleader.

One time, some ang moh (I think) swam across the sea right in front of all the surf rods. Goodness, didn't he know that he was right in the casting zone like a sitting duck? Very dangerous.



I got into trouble with my abu D5 and got a very bad birdnest. It was so bad that I finally decided to snip off the lines, thereby losing about 1/2 a spool of lines. Worse is, a tiny bit of line somehow got trapped into the spool and when I cast one time, it went barely 50 metres. It was so embarassing as the 2 guys must be thinking that I was some kind of newbie. My theory was that the bit of line was acting like a brake and due to that, I couldn't cast far. So, after that, I had basically reduce my chance of a fish drastically, as the beach area was rather shallow. To compensate, I rigged up my Rapala and casted out smaller prawns. But that didn't have any luck too. I rigged up my light tackle for a short while, but no luck with it either.

During this time, D was having fun swimming around the beach area and playing with some new found malay friends.

Around 3pm, tide was already going down. An old malay couple came by and decided to park themselves right in front of my bench and blaring loud music! Goodness...so, decided to pack and gave up my bench to the malay guy on my right. By now, we were quite friendly with each other and I passed him all my unused prawns. So much for the barra, even 1 ikan bilis also didn't have. :(





After that, I headed to Sentosa for dinner and had a bit of fun. First time driving there, and I was impressed with the new additions and facilities springing up all over Palawan beach. Dinner was a curry fish head at the newly opened Foodcourt. Too bad that fishing is now out of bounds. If not, I would certainly be a regular there.