Crazy fishing adventure

I spent 6 years living in Perth, Western Australia. There, my love for the sun & the surf grew greater than I expected. Then again, being in Perth there wasn’t much else to do anyway. One of the activities I loved whilst living there was fishing. Perth, being fairly close to the Indian Ocean and being right smack by the Swan River was pretty much dominated by all sorts of water sports and activities. The coastline in Australia is also pretty well developed, so much so that we’d be able to head out to the nearest coastline or riverside and be able to practically cast our lines out and start fishing immediately.

Now in Malaysia, it’s a whole different story. The coastline is nowhere as developed and is basically wild growth, meaning there is a major lack of good shoreline fishing spots. Also, being on the west coast of peninsula Malaysia, all we had was the Straits of Malacca, or as I’d like to call it, the drain. It clearly wasn’t anything like the Indian Ocean, but that didn’t deter me and Izzat from heading out for a fishing adventure.

It turned out to be an eye opening adventure. Let me set the scene a bit here, going back at least 10 years. I used to live in South Perth for a bit and the river was pretty much just across the street. As such, I’ve done a bit of fishing by the bridge as well as the riverside. All one had to do was head out to the riverside, pick a spot and cast away. And the catch was pretty decent as well, with Bream and the occasional flounder being the typical catch.

Fade back to the present. Since coming back to Malaysia, the only fishing I’ve done has basically been open sea fishing on a boat. So when the folks at the tackle shop told us about a spot near the river mouth in Port Klang, we decided to check it out. When we got to the spot, it was pretty clearly a bridge, and we could see many anglers on the platforms all the way out to mid-river. What we couldn’t figure out was how they got there, as the platforms were clearly pretty high off the waterline. We asked the folks around there and were told that the access to the platforms would cost us RM1 and we had to see the fellas under the bridge.

Thinking we would be taken out on a boat to the platforms we were pretty shocked when the bloke collecting the “access” fee pointed at a hole above our heads under one of the bridge’s support platforms. It was practically a service tunnel or something under the bridge! Undeterred, we climbed up and made our way through to the furthest and least occupied platform mid-river. Climbing down onto the platform was as un-nerving as the trip out to mid-river on wooden planks in a service tunnel. But damn it, we were gonna get some fishing done.

Well, after spending some 4hours on the platform, all we caught was 3 miserably sized garfish and needlefish and one ugly stonefish or something. As far as shoreline or riverside fishing in Malaysia goes, forget it… it ain’t worth jack! I’ll stick to doing it off a boat in the middle of the sea. So chalk that up as an experience, been there, done that, throw the idea away and bring on the next crazy-assed idea for bored nutters… which is… cricket. But that’ll have to be for another day.