The Fish of Another Country: Mel Takes Us Giant Snakehead Fishing

I always check in with the Fly Fishing with Mel blog — it’s an interesting Malaysian-based fly fishing blog. While he fishes for species I’ve never heard of, his passion for the sport is pretty clearly the same.

The latest installment is a “must read.”

It’s the first installment detailing Mel’s three-day fishing trip to Lake Kenyir, includes photos of exotic (to us) fish, and offers a description of a fishing lodget on stilts that Donny Beaver won’t be acquiring anytime soon.

A great read, if only for the information gleaned from passages like this:

The Hampala Barb, or known locally as the Sebarau, is one of the highly sought after fish by us, fly anglers. With a migratory habit similar to the salmon, it uses its great strength to swim up the fast flowing rapids and even leap up waterfalls to head upstream to spawn. Its range covers most of the lake but prefers to live and hunt near waterfalls and tree stumps. Even a juvenile, barely bigger than a palm can give a good account of itself on light tackle. It is the natural nemesis of the Giant Snakehead, picking of the young by using its great speed to avoid the protective parents guarding the school.

The fish I want to catch? The Malaysian Mahseer (Tor tambra).

While teasing one to take a fly has been accomplished before, it is a very very difficult undertaking. The usual means of catching one involves chumming with a bag of oil palm fruit and then using stiff tackle, fish with a piece of the palm fruit. The powerful jaws can crush 5X strong hooks with relative ease and it’s powerful runs can even break 40lbs tackle in a flash.

Sign me up! You’ll want to read Part I of the report at: Link to Fly Fishing with Mel: Return from the North - Lake Kenyir (Prologue)

See you on Lake Kenyir, Tom Chandler

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