Dear Mega Fishing Thailand, With my office in Perth Australia closing for the holiday period, on an impulse I went online to see if I could score myself a reasonable priced ticket to Thailand. To my surprise they were readily available and two days later I was on sitting on a Thai Airways plane bound for Bangkok. Having no real plans on what I was going to do over the next week I hired a 4WD at the airport and headed off up country to try a couple of fishing spots I had heard about. After a couple of hours of shooting the breeze and looking around I headed off to find a hotel for night.

The next day bright and early I was down to the Predator lake and started lure fishing without much success, so I swapped to using floating bread and a paste made from fish feeding pellets soaked in water. This proved a lot more successful and over the next few hours I caught a number of rohu, pacu, tilapia, red-tailed tiger catfish and Africanized catfish. At about 1:30pm the guide, who works at the lake, gave the ok to use live and dead bait for the rest of the day up to the 8pm closure time. The afternoon and evening session was quite productive, and I caught 5 ‘Chado’ (snakehead) on live bait, which has been recently introduced into the lake and four arapaima of around the 30-40kg mark on dead bait.

The next day followed a similar trend; at least it did until around 5pm. I had been fishing with live and dead bait for three hours and had only caught one ‘Chado’ when suddenly the line started peeling off my reel. I jumped up and struck and there was a tremendous swirl in the water only about 20 metres out.. My first thought was whether I had actually hooked this big fish or had I just spooked it, as there seemed to be very little pressure on the line. As I tightened down to fish I realized I had indeed hooked into a huge arapaima as it launched it head and half its body out of the water in an effort to shake the hook free or at least break the line. For the next 30 minutes the leviathan trashed around and two of the guides waited in the water with the holding pen. It took at least half a dozen attempts to grab hold of the fish and guide it through the open end of the netting. The guides were very cautious as they knew from past experience; one head butt from such a large and powerful arapaima could easily send you to the hospital.

The next task was to photograph this tremendous fish without it escaping. Noi one of Francois’s professional guides rose to the challenge of holding the dangerous end as we carefully lifted the arapaima out from its holding pen.  The owner came down and said that this fish had only been recently stocked into the lake less than a month ago and added it weighed 110kg and was a lake record. He also pointed out that it was the number 2 fish in the lake as he had stocked a much bigger one than this in 2006.

The next day I turned up thinking anything I catch today will be a bonus. The day was very windy and the fishing slow. I lost an arapaima on a lure of around 25kg in the morning. The wind subsided around 6pm and finally I started to get some bites, frustratingly they were initially pacu which have an annoying tendency of dashing off with the bait in there mouths and letting it go as you strike. About 7:30 I caught an alligator gar, and once it was landed photographed and returned to the water, I was considering whether it was worth while recasting the rod as it was now 7:45 only 15 minutes before stumps. Before I could decide the line on the other rod started to peel off madly I ran over and struck. There was a big swirl at the edge of the lake and my fist concern was that in the dark I had struck in the wrong direction and had I in fact set the hook properly. The fish now tore off across the lake and initially felt like a decent sized Amazon red-tailed catfish. After about 10 minutes the fish surfaced for air and we realized it was in fact a good sized arapaima which the guide estimated to be 60kg+. The fish then again took off not stopping to it reached the far end of the lake over 350m from where it was first hooked. We decided we would try and turn the fish and bring it back to the corner of the lake that had good lighting to make it easier to guide into the recovery pen. After a tumultuous struggle that lasted 1 hour and five minutes, the three guides eventually managed without mishap to get a firm grip on the fish and steer it in. At this point the head guide casually pointed out with a smile that this fish was in fact much bigger than the previous day’s monster at a colossal 140kg.

I thought at this point I had caught the number 1 fish the owner had told be about. But he said it was not the one, and was in fact the smallest of the three 100kg+ fish he had released in 2006 and had grown 46cm in length since it’s released an incredible growth rate by all accounts. You have to wonder how big the biggest one is now…

Best regards and tight lines to all
Tim Webb Perth Australia