THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

Dawn Williams into yet another big reef fish Needless to say I gave that one a miss. Then I
stumbled across this Australian lady named Shelly
who owned a small restaurant on the road into Kota Kinabalu where we'd called in for a meal, who also
owned a boat with a skipper who would take parties out to fish. The boat was called 'Fat Cat', and the
man in charge was Edwin Pong.
Conditions across all the trips we did were never ideal, though always fishable, just about. The journey
out to the grounds was also long. Certainly to get amongst the better fish.
Borneo had suffered a lot of unwanted attention from commercial fishermen coming over from the
nearby Philippines using dynamite, which besides killing or damaging the fish, more worryingly was
destroying the reefs capability for short term recovery.
At that time, the Malaysian authorities looked to be getting a grip on the situation, but full recovery was
still some way off, the result being that it was difficult to find good sections of reef that had not been
seriously affected, and good fish stocks that hadn't also been hit hard.
Fortunately, the crew had a few aces up their sleeve which would make the long hard slog out into the
South China Sea worthwhile. Certainly more worthwhile than staying inshore, where all I saw was a
few local fishermen coming in with the odd barracuda and small snapper.
The marina too was full of small fish, and on one occasion when we were taken across the bay to a nice
restaurant built on legs standing up from the water on a tiny island just across the way, I saw lots of
small jacks and other interesting looking fish nosing around the docking platform, which obviously you
couldn't fish from.
So there were opportunities inshore too, if only some way could be found of exploiting them. Otherwise,
you needed to be afloat and heading well offshore.
To put things into context, the fishing was a bit like Whitby. The water was deep, but not too deep; the
ground was heavy, but not too tackle hungry, and the fish were feeding right down in amongst it at the
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