THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

MALAYSIA
Kuala Lumpur was a stopover en-route back to the UK from Borneo. As we were scheduled to change
planes there, we thought we might as well stay over for a few days in what turned out to be an incredible
city. Clean, high tech, and feeling perfectly safe, with great night time entertainment in the open air bars
scattered around the Petronas Towers.
Really friendly people too. So friendly in fact that a chap called
Phill Williams, Giant Snakehead
Auslan who I'd exchanged a few angling emails with in the run
up to the visit, agreed to meet up with us and introduced me to
several of his locally well known fishing friends.
These fellow fishermen included a local tackle dealer, plus angling journalist Aznir Abdul Malek, who
after a nice meal and a few beers, offered to take me for a day fishing for giant snakehead, which I had
secretly hoped might be to the vast jungle wilderness of Tasik Temenggor in the north of the country
where snakeheads, jungle perch, and mahseer, are common place. But the distances involved were too
great.
Instead, they arranged a visit to a local fishery called Tow Foo, which is a small commercial lure only
water close to the Sepang F1 race circuit, where because of the limited amount of time, and me never
having seen a snakehead, the fishery owner waived the lures only rule and provided my with a load of
small dead-baits.
One the face of things a concession, except that none of us had suitable terminal tackle for bait fishing.
So we cobbled together the heaviest mono trace and largest hook we could muster, baited it up, and
threw it out into the pea green water, leaving it to fish free-lined with the bale arm open where it was
instantly picked up by a good fish. An encounter which unfortunately only lasted seconds, as the culprit
quickly bit through the monofilament trace.
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