Newsletter February 2016
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Catches, entertainment and news from Thailand’s only exclusive syndicated sport-fishing venue.
Welcome once again to the Jurassic Mountain newsletter that gives you all the news, gossip, catch reports and light hearted anglers antics that relates to this Thailand fishing paradise for the month of February. A big thanks to all the new faces and returning guests who succumbed to the gravitational pull of our Thailand fishing paradise, it was our pleasure indeed to welcome you all to Jurassic Mountain Resort and Fishing Park.
FEBRUARY 1st.
The first morning sun of February appeared and I felt the warmth as it spread it’s light across Jurassic Mountain. It reminded me of a few words that seemed so appropriate in that moment.
Every sunset signals one less day of your life but every sunrise brings you one more day and one more day of hope.
Nice words those eh? It just proves that everybody’s hoping for something or the other and, on that note, my hope for today was that I hoped this new angler on the lake, Billy from Liverpool would have a really good day.
There was no particular reason for this apart from the fact that I could see the sheer delight in his eyes when he first saw the lake, the almost childish excitement in his voice when he spoke endlessly of his session to come and his unlimited optimism as he described the monsters that he was about to land. Like most scousers I know, Billy had plenty of ‘rabbit’ and he made sure that everybody heard a piece of it.
Yes, this angler’s infectious exuberance uplifted everybody’s mood and this was the angler that I hoped above all others would have a day to remember.
So as the day wore on and on and the sun began to set on yet one more day of my life, I once again looked forward to tomorrow’s sunrise. Not for any particular reason really other than just to hope that Billy from Liverpool would by then have calmed down, concentrated more on his fishing and stopped bloody talking for at least one minute.
Right, let’s now take a light hearted and a very tongue in cheek look at a selection of the rest of the anglers who graced Jurassic Mountain for the month of February. As per normal my apologies are extended to those who wanted a mention but didn’t get one and to those who got a mention ….. and wished they hadn’t. Here goes ….
The two Lee’s from Essex were extremely happy that they’d plumped for Jurassic Mountain within their flying Thailand visit as they had a great time landing Siamese carp and redtails here with the biggest carp weighing in at 108 pounds. You’ll see these two lads in the main newsletter photo experiencing a double hook up with both fish eventually finding their way into the net.
Another two very satisfied customers who’ll spread the Jurassic word no doubt and seeing as Lee is a British Airways pilot, that word will be spread a lot further than most.
Another pilot who spread the word was on a Heathrow bound Jumbo jet. Switching on the intercom, he announced, ‘ Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now making our final approach to Heathrow, thank you for flying with Rarely-Crash Airways and we hope you have a safe onward journey……..’ at which point he forgot to turn the intercom off.
Turning to the co-pilot he said, ‘ Well Rodger, what’s your plans for the rest of the day?’
The co pilot replied, ‘ The wife’s meeting me at the hotel and then we’re off into London to catch a show. Don’t know what show she’s booked though, what’s your plans Mike?’
The cabin crew and passengers meanwhile are quite enjoying this change from the norm as the captain replied, ‘As you know my divorce was finalised last week so I’ll be taking a long soak in the bath before ordering dinner in my room. I’m thinking that after that I’ll call that pretty new blonde stewardess working upstairs, Marie I think her name is. I’ll take her out for a drink and then back to my room and give her a damn good seeing to.’
At this point the passengers cheered loudly and in the upper deck, Marie, realising that the intercom was still on and in her hurry to get downstairs and let them know, ran up the aisle and tripped headlong over an old lady’s handbag that was poking out from under her seat.
‘There’s no need to hurry love,’ said the old lady looking down at the spreadeagled young woman, ‘He’s going to have a bath first.’
Back at Jurassic, ‘The fishing experience of a lifetime’ was how the two Lee’s described their visit to The Mountain and vowed to return again in the not too distant future. I will personally look forward to meeting up with these two fellas again.
February saw the return of Angus, a bricklayer from Peterborough in the UK who you may remember as having fished with us here in December before making his way off to the Philippines for a spot of scuba diving.
I joined Angus as he was sat on his swim to see how his day was going and to chat about his diving experience and I casually asked him why was it that divers always fell backwards into the sea?
‘Well,’ said Angus, ‘ if they fell forward……..they’d still be in the bloody boat.’
We were still laughing when Angus’s line screamed from off the reel attached to his carp rod and thankfully, as we were on the subject of diving, he didn’t make the mistake of rolling backwards out of his seat and disappearing into the bushes but managed to dive forwards and strike into a cracking Siamese carp around 70 pounds and the next day got even better for him when he smashed into a 250 pound arapaima for good measure.
Well done Angus. Hmm…. Well done Angus? I think I should rephrase that…… it sounds like I’m ordering a steak.
Do you remember the story in the Angling Times about Jake Casson from the UK who hooked into a monster carp here at Jurassic Mountain and endured a 12 hour battle that sadly finally resulted in a hook pull? Well, Jake has returned yet again in his quest to hook and this time land the fish that affectionately became known as the ‘Grim Reaper.’ Unfortunately, this magnificent brute of a fish has become bored with running anglers ragged for hours upon end and has devised a method of avoiding the hook although there has been one or two instances of a very large fish being lost after a few minutes that could well be attributed to him. In other words, he’s playing a very crafty game of hide and seek and I believe it’s going to need a piece of ingenuity rather than a piece of luck before we see this brute in the net. Any takers?
Meanwhile, Jake arrived for a five day stint complete with his master plan and strategy of man against fish and a desire to have a full Thai wax, back and crack treatment but that’s a subject best kept under wraps as I’m sure Jake wouldn’t be too chuffed with me letting our thousands of readers know about his strange fetish.
So, back to the fishing, although this time around Jake didn’t manage to make contact with his old adversary and a sudden cold spell here certainly didn’t help his cause, on his first day he landed 3 Siamese around the mid thirties to forties but his second day wasn’t such a good day. The colder weather had set in which had seen a significant reduction in fish being tempted to the hook and quite a few anglers were finding it pretty tough going. Yes, even in Thailand fish will be fish and if anything decrees that they want to play hide and seek, then hide they certainly will. In fact Jake had just spent 3 days on another location in Thailand where he’d had been better off staying in bed such was his return for his 3 days efforts. This cold snap isn’t cold by UK standards but when you’ve been used to mid to upper thirties every day and all of a sudden it drops to mid twenties, you certainly feel it.
Anyway, I’d dropped by Jake’s swim to say hello and to see how he was faring during this particularly tough period of time just in time to see his line scream off and watch him crack into a nice sized carp …. only to lose it after a 15 minute scrap. As I said, he wasn’t having a very good day.
On Jake’s third day, he decided to vacate the swim of his previous two days and relocate himself in swim number three on the opposite bank. Now there’s only a couple of swims out of the seventeen available that don’t have covered salas and swim number 3 is at the moment one of them. Hence this swim is very rarely fished and I wondered if this was a wise move as he was specifically targeting carp who maybe would prefer locations where there’s a known food source as in a regular deposit of bait.
At the end of the day in this swim which produced nothing for Jake except for a stiff cool wind for company, I felt as if my theory was correct but as everybody else on the lake had very mixed results, I put it down to the inclement weather conditions instead.
Day 4 saw Jake shift back to his original swim that he’d fished from for his first two days and although a few more fish were landed around the lake than on the previous days, the results we’re still pretty sketchy although Jake’s persistence saw 3 fine Siamese to his net weighing in at 45, 50 and the best of the trio at 70 pounds.
And so onto day 5 where we woke to a sharp wind and another significant drop in temperature, this time to a bone numbing 18 degrees. The conditions once again didn’t warrant an optimistic outlook for the day but we had seven anglers around the lake determined to buck the trend. Unfortunately when mother nature decides to throw a spanner in the works there’s not a lot that you can do about it and so it proved because at the end of the day the results spoke for themselves. Apart from Chris from Swanley in Kent who despite hooking and losing four fish landed six more being three Siamese at 20,30 and 40 pounds respectively plus three substantial redtails but everybody else found it very tough indeed as they only managed to land one’s and two’s between them including Jake, who despite trying every trick he knew to entice the fish to feed, only managed to land one solitary Siamese in the mid twenties.
Well, it wasn’t the best 5 days fishing that Jake had ever experienced that’s for sure but before Jake had even arrived, I’d already decided that I was going to write a day by day report on his hunt for the massive carp that last year almost put him in hospital and I see no reason to change my mind now. Well at least you know that here at Jurassic Mountain we don’t only report about the good times but we’ll give you the tougher times too. Tough times are part and parcel of this sport that we all love and, even in these tough conditions, still enjoy because at any moment, it might just turn and be your day but unfortunately this time around, it wasn’t to be for our Jake. So was Jake disappointed? Not at all because Jake’s an angler who accepted this fact in the true anglers spirit.
I met Tony from Angmering near Worthing in the UK who arrived for a one day visit. Firstly I was pretty pleased when Tony congratulated me on my newsletters especially the ‘Oleg the Russian’ story last month which by all accounts he thoroughly enjoyed and more to the point which pleased me most, thoroughly understood. So with this in mind, when at 11am having asked him if he’d caught anything yet, his answer of “F..k all yet but loving it” summed up my whole perception of fishing perfectly because everybody plugged on gamely in the adverse conditions and most were rewarded with a hard earned fish or two including Mike from Twickenham in the UK whose perseverance and patience got well rewarded when he hooked, fought and landed a monster Siamese carp of 180 pounds right at the very last knockings. Every cloud does has a silver lining then?
Its warming up! After the toughest and coldest 5 day spell here at Jurassic Mountain that we can ever remember, mother nature’ relented and once again decided to come out on the side of the angler as I awoke this morning to a definite rise in temperature and, by the end of the day, a definite rise in activity around the lake. The best results of the day were handed in by Lee from Exeter who landed a Siamese carp of just over the hundred pounds, Dick from Parham in Suffolk who weighed in with a 158 pound beauty and finally Denise from the UK who showed husband Gary just how it’s done by going out for the last couple of hours and getting a nice 50 odd pounder to the bank. Are you talking to her yet Gary?
We said ‘top of the morning’ to Niall and Sean from County Kerry in Ireland who had a great first day landing 5 Siamese to 55 pounds and 8 redtails to 45 between them.
Now I know that the Irish have been the brunt of many a joke in the past which questions their IQ rating but these two lads seemed pretty intelligent to me. That is until I heard the story that one night whilst driving along the motorway in Ireland, Niall swerved to avoid a tree that was slap bang in the middle of the road, then another and another one until he screeched to a halt on the hard shoulder
The police pulled up behind him so he told them about the trees in the middle of the road,
‘Those trees sir,’ replied the copper ‘was your air freshener swinging about.’
We had Paul and Russell from Oxford who enjoyed their extended ten day visit to the Mountain and also enjoyed celebrating Paul’s birthday in style on an evening excursion into Hua hin which I’d also managed to invite myself on. A good too many drinks were consumed that night and it felt as if more drinks were consumed than the total amount of fish that they caught during their 10 day visit and believe me, they caught quite a few. Highlights of their catches included a session that saw a 45 pound Siamese carp for Russell with a 50 odd pounder for Paul and another session saw a brace of cracking Siamese for Paul in the space of 15 minutes that were in excess of a hundred pounds a piece. Not a bad birthday present eh?
Paul has been single for twelve years now and after a messy divorce with ‘er indoors’ that took Paul to the proverbial cleaners, he has now got himself back on track and has decided to devote the rest of his life to angling instead. It just proves that there’s no difference between a hurricane and a wife ….you’ll lose your house to the pair of ’em. Anyway, it’s little wonder that he made this decision because apparently he bumped into his neighbour one morning way back when he was married who said, ‘Paul, would you mind closing your bedroom curtains when your making love to the wife, the whole street was watching last night and you were a laughing stock.’
‘ Me? A laughing stock?’ replied Paul, ‘Well the jokes on you lot cos I wasn’t even home last night.’
So a life dedicated to angling seems a good decision mate……tight lines and we’ll look forward to seeing you again next February.
Ricardo from Holland was lucky enough to be the guy who had his mugshot taken with the latest addition deposited into the lake being a Siamese carp just a few ounces short of 160 pounds. We have a steady stream of new stock of various species being introduced into Jurassic Mountain and this beauty is just one of the many that have happily relocated to their new home.
We kept our fingers crossed that a Siamese carp precedent had been set by the quality carp that had been landed recently and this certainly seemed to be the case because we had Alex from Sheffield who is a match angler and who just happens to own his own fishery next to the M1. Bet his view ‘aint as good as this place. Anyway, Alex enjoyed his first day here by grafting hard on the waggler which landed eight fish including one Indian carp and three Siamese to 65 pounds whilst East London boy, Darren from Wanstead got in on the act and landed four Siamese beauties to the 85 mark.
Richard from Bath in the UK owns a stretch of the Avon, his first day went rather well really. Five fish consisting of four different species. Two Siamese to 50 odd pounds, one Amazon redtail to 45, one Asian redtail around the 20 and, oh yes, I almost forgot, an arapaima that was in excess of a whopping 250 pounds. Can’t be bad, a superb fish indeed.
Unfortunately, as many of our Jurassic facebook followers will no doubt have noticed, we had one particular reader from up in Swadlincote who deemed it necessary to make himself look a bit of a plonker by posting that this fish had obviously been super imposed into the photograph. You may well have also noticed that Jules replied to this comment with a barrage of ‘super imposed’ photographs including the Jurassic Mountain breakfast and of course the mountain itself which was of course just a bit of fun reply but on a serious note, due to this unfounded and completely untrue comment from someone who probably has never seen a fish of this size let alone caught one which could well be the main reason for his comment, we extend our apologies to Richard Young the captor of this superb specimen because it seems that there’s always one person out there who, maybe its just because of jealousy or for some other obscure reason will revel in attempting to discredit other peoples achievements. Sad but a very true fact I’m afraid.
Anyway readers, I’ve said my piece and I stand by it but you can be your own judges on this one because here’s the photo of the fish in question proudly held aloft by Richard, a very happy UK fishery owner who was so pleased at getting to grips with a decent fish for a change and because who no doubt has had more than his own fair share of ‘Mr negatives’ in the past as well on his own fishery. Somehow it just seems to go with the territory in this sport but thankfully and fortunately for us all they are well in the minority.
Back to paradise we had returning guest and friend Eliot from the UK arrived with his pal Lee who resides in Pattaya.
They were overwhelmed with the quality of their lakeside accommodation with a particular liking to the ‘nice fluffy towels’ that are provided on a daily basis. This liking was more than evident when Eliot found that he couldn’t do the zip up on his suitcase but one Siamese around 30 pounds and four redtails to 60 were more than enough to keep him and Lee happy.
Another returning guest was Martin from Manchester who arrived back again to continue his love affair with Jurassic Mountain. Martin is well known here for his superstitious nature and always wears the same outfit whilst fishing the same swim and no doubt with his fingers crossed on both hands. In fact he’s that superstitious, when I informed him last year that Christmas day would fall on a Friday, he replied “let’s hope it ‘aint the 13th.”
A brace of Siamese to 85 pounds, an Amazon redtail to 65 and an arapaima around the 140 made for a great day for Martin. Obviously didn’t walk under a ladder on the way here then?
And so it came to pass that signs of normal service were being resumed here at Jurassic Mountain when we had sporadic moments of the lake fishing it’s bloody head off again and therefore confining the indifferent spell that we had endured for well over a week into history.
Here’s a selection of the best moments…
Perfect for starters was how I described Graham’s tambaqui (above) because he later sampled the main course when he landed this cracker ….
The well respected Angling Times angler and journalist Martin Bowler who also hosts annual angling excursions arrived here to welcome ten UK anglers who were all looking forward to and raring to get going for the long awaited Martin Bowler Jurassic Mountain fishing experience.
Because their visit started late Feb and continued for seven days into March, I’ll be giving it a mention in next months newsletter. May the fishing gods be with them all.
Prior to Martins’s guests arrival, he decided to spend the day on the lake just to see if he could latch into something or the other and it wasn’t long before the Martin Bowler know how came to the fore as he hooked into a fantastic specimen arapaima that was well in excess of 300 pounds and which he eventually got to the net after a grueling one hour battle. Welcome back to Jurassic Mountain Martin.
So as February drew to a close, we looked back on the anglers who visited Jurassic for the exotic fishing Thailand has to offer and we found that our swims were occupied no less than 223 times which bagged 431 Siamese carp to 180 pounds, 22 Indian carp to 34 pounds, 14 arapaima to 320 pounds, 472 Amazon Redtails to 62 pounds, 17 Asian Redtails to 35 pounds, 4 Chao Praya catfish to 96 pounds, 3 Niger ripsaws to 24 pounds, 21 tambaqui to 42 pounds, 2 snakehead to 18 pounds and 2 pacu to 15 pounds totaling an amazing 988 fish in all.
So apart from the fantastic fishing that you’ll find at Jurassic Mountain , you’ll also find that it’s conveniently situated in Thailand and serves as a great base for exploring other activities and places to visit. People have asked me for any information regarding these other locations so I came up with the bright idea of not only writing about them but personally visiting them to form my own opinion of them and if they were interesting enough, then I’d write about them in the newsletter. So for the benefit of all future Jurassic guests who want to combine something different with their fishing experience, the first place that I put to the test was a Jungle lodge floating raft resort up on the River Kwai for 2 days.
I would just like to add that my normal holiday activities are confined to within a nice comfy bed in a nice beachside hotel somewhere hot and I’m not really into the ‘Adventure holiday’ stuff. I prefer a nice bottle of red in a restaurant rather than a spot of mountain climbing to be honest but this resort looked the ideal place to go back to nature for a couple of days in comfort and style.
And ‘Going back to Nature’ it certainly was but in future I’ll settle for the guaranteed comforts of Jurassic Mountain instead if you don’t mind.
However, for those of you who might like the idea of going back to nature completely, then this is definitely the place for you. Not for me I’m afraid, I’ll tell you why….
They do advertise the fact that there is no Wifi and no electric and that lamplight and slightly colder showers were the norm but that didn’t deter me in my quest to broaden my horizons all for the benefit of the Jurassic newsletter readers.
The location of this place was out of this world and could well have been the location in a Tarzan movie so if you’d enjoy being dumped on a floating tinderbox in the arse end of nowhere that looks like it went back to nature over 200 years ago and if you get turned on by ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of here,’ read on…
We were shown to our floating tree house, er, I mean lodge and as basic goes, basic it certainly was. A large bed with a mosquito net that looked like a shroud was just about it really but I thought it quite nice in a way. That was until I saw the shower compartment that reminded me of being something that you’d see in a in a P.O.W. camp. A WC, a small sink and a shower hose all fitted over an open wooden slatted floor immediately turned my thoughts to my nice comfortable de-luxe suite at Jurassic Mountain but I was here on the Kwai and determined to make the best of it. A shower before dinner was the highlight of the evening. I know we were advised that there wasn’t any hot water but they conveniently didn’t add that the shower by lamplight experience was so cold that it made you feel like you’d gone from the Sahara to Siberia in two seconds flat.
So, after the quickest shower in history, we had dinner by lamplight and apart from a traditional show by a local village people that played music that I’d never heard before and have no desire to ever hear again, there was nothing else to do apart from sit there and take in the feeling of solitude or go to bed. After a nice bottle of claret, I chose the latter.
A deep sleep ensued and was only interrupted by the traditional village people’s cockerel letting rip at 2am. Somebody definitely needs to supply that chicken with a clock. He didn’t stop until daylight four hours later.
So there I was lying in bed wide awake listening to the jungle noises that nature throws at you accompanied by the insomniac cockerel and the rest of his mates who’d got in on the act so I gave up trying to go back to sleep and decided to get up and watch the sun come up in readiness for my day of relaxation and solitude ahead which was basically laying in a hammock watching the River Kwai flow past. It was most enjoyable although after fourteen hours of it, It did become a tad boring because there’s only so many hours in a day that you can lay in a hammock staring at water before getting the overpowering suicidal urge to bloody chuck yourself into it.
So that’s the end of my first and last attempt of being the new ‘Alan Whicker’ for the Jurassic Mountain newsletter and I’d suggest that you try these places of wonder for yourselves but I would just like to add that Thailand is such a very beautiful place and watching and hearing the jungle come to life was quite an inspiring and unforgettable experience……I just wish it had hot water and I’d taken ear plugs and a book.
So as the last sunset of February faded away into the dark and off into the annals of history, my thoughts returned once more to those nice words about hope and to that exuberant excited angler at the beginning of this newsletter Billy, the ultra talkative lad from Liverpool who, despite my hopes that he’d have a particularly great day and despite my hopes that he’d eventually stop talking, he only managed to talk himself into a couple of redtails although one did tip the scales at 50 odd pounds. However, I’m pleased to announce that on his second day, with no signs of his vocal chords being given a rest, he had his mood dramatically uplifted to maniacal when he finally weighed in with a brace of Siamese carp that weighed in at over 210 pounds between them and which thankfully for everybody concerned eventually rendered him speechless with joy thank god.
See, it just proves that you wont always get what you hope for in life but give it time, because here at Jurassic Mountain ……..more often than not you do.
That’s your lot for this month, we’ve got our returning friend Steve ‘Diver’ Rutter coming in a couple of weeks which should provide an interesting story or two and coupled with the Martin Bowler experience it hopefully should make really good reading so I will be looking forward to writing the next edition of the Jurassic Mountain newsletter at the end of this month.
Tight lines all.
If this newsletter tempts you to sample the delights that Jurassic Mountain has to offer, please contact Jules or Eddy for full details and if you mention newsletter in your enquiry, you’ll get a free upgrade into a de-luxe poolside suite subject to availability.