Malaysia’s Sea of Sailfish

Text and photos by Doug Olander, Editor-In-Chief of Sport Fishing Magazine

Vol. 13.  No. 4

Our frustration at the lack of sailfish action had started to boil over. “I don’t understand where the sails are,” grumbled my colleague and fellow light-tackle aficionado, Rob Sherman, as the Los Angeles-based angler scanned the mirror-calm waters of the South China Sea for sail sign.

To better appreciate the nature of our bellyaching, the situation begs for some context, so here you go: In three of four days fishing off eastern Malaysia, we had either a single or double hookup on Pacific sailfish literally within five minutes of lines in and, when not hooked up, we still saw sailfish all over the place, often right around the boat.

Point being: It doesn’t take long at all when sailfishing this exotic Asian coast to grow spoiled enough to throw expectations wildly out of reason.

And while we did pick up and move shortly thereafter to find the fish that morning – versus them finding us straightaway as on other mornings – we ended the day with many sails caught, and still others hooked and lost, plus many seen tailing, feeding or free-jumping.

The next day proved more the norm, with our initial strike coming less than two minutes after the first live scad hit the water, and ending with a double-digit release total.

We’d come to Malaysia with high hopes after hearing reports of a world-class sailfish fishery almost wholly unknown in the Western world.

Those reports, I’m happy to say, are true.

Farm-Pond Fishing

Two years before this visit to Kuala Rompin on the shore of southeastern Malaysia, my antenna had gone way up as I read an e-mail from my Danish friend, SF[[ITAL]] contributor and outstanding photographer, Johnny Jensen (www.jjphoto.dk). Just back from Malaysia, he mentioned two small boats releasing 29 sailfish in one day. “It was really crazy!” Jensen wrote. “Besides the 29 to the boat, we lost about 15 or 20 more.” The JPG images he attached to his e-mail, showing sails flying high above the millpond sea, backed him up.

That started the wheels turning, and last fall, there I was!

Jensen hooked us up with an operation based in Singapore, Fishzone Charters Sportfishing, which specializes strictly in fishing off Rompin, a quiet coastal community on the South China Sea. The two gents who run that op, Dominic Pereira and Ian Pinto, proved to be ideal guides, outfitters and hosts, with their act clearly together.

After breakfast at a small eatery with amazing Asian omelets and teh tarik, a Malaysian staple of sweet, strong tea with milk, we all carried gear to the boat at the jeti (many Malay words are adopted from English, as with “jetty”), a colorful, ramshackle and laid-back launch site.

Shortly after, the 35-foot, locally built, beamy fiberglass boat with a generous hardtop (great for relief from a hot sun but precluding easy walk-around access), pulled away. We cruised out the river mouth into a one-foot chop. Typically, during the prime sailfish season – the latter half of July into early November – even that small chop almost inevitably fades as the morning wears on to conditions you’d find on most farm ponds.

A 20-minute run put us on a bait stop – a FAD (fish-attracting device) of tires sunk by commercial fishermen and marked with a small buoy in about 30 feet of water. Out went sabiki rigs and, fairly quickly, in came a variety of small fish – lots of various trevallies and scads, red-hued “sea bream” and small colorful species of snappers. I thought we might keep them all for sailfish bait, but Pereira proved pretty picky. We really wanted scads (small members of the trevally/jack family, much like goggle-eyes, for instance) and just two types of scads, at that – what he called Indian mackerel and yellowtail scads – if we could get enough of them. Some days that’s quick and easy; other days, well … those red sea bream start looking really good!

>Alive with Sails

About a half-hour later, Pereira announced that we had put enough scads in the livewell, and we throttled up the twin 115 hp Suzukis. We pushed on for another half-hour or so until we slowed at the sailfish grounds, about 25 miles off Rompin. What exactly defines this area as a hot spot, I never completely grasped. There seems to be absolutely no structure or bottom relief of any kind for miles; in that respect, it’s much like the Gulf of Mexico – a very shallow, sandy bottom with little slope – though lacking the Gulf’s limestone shelves and oil rigs.

So why all the sails? Presumably, bait keeps them here. That said, I saw scant evidence of surface-rippling or showering acres of baitfish (though on some days, we did spot several ramshackle anchovy net boats apparently doing a bang-up business on small ‘chovies). For the most part, at first glance, we appeared to be stopping on a calm, lifeless desert.

But initial perceptions quickly gave way to a very different reality on our first day when my third cast off the bow with a Williamson popper brought a couple of lit-up sailfish following it almost to the boat. Then we began to notice birds in twos, threes or fours here and there flying erratically and dipping to the water over tails, bills and towering dorsal fins, plus occasional silver splashes of free-jumpers. In fact, the ocean was alive with sailfish.

“There’s been no research to support this, but I think the area off Rompin is a breeding ground,” says Anthony Sullivan, another area outfitter. He notes that 10 years ago, no one had the slightest idea that such a fishery existed here. When hand-line trollers pursuing narrowbarred mackerel complained of hooking sailfish, a few angling enthusiasts took notice.

These days, 10 or so boats will take out anglers (most from Japan, Australia and Europe) for Rompin sails during prime season, Pereira says.

Rig for Silent Drifting

Fishzone charters simply run a thin-wire #5/0 Mutu Light Owner circle hook on a 6-foot 120-pound fluoro or mono leader through the collar of the baitfish. Often, one of the crew attaches a balloon, rigged to break away at the strike, as a float though sometimes the bite’s too hot to need or want to mess with that. The angler free-spools the livey back 100 feet or a bit more to wait with the rig in hand or in a rod holder (clicker on) – generally not for long.

I didn’t see much enthusiasm for kite fishing here. The why-bother attitude is hard to argue with when very simple techniques take sail after sail. Another reason kites could be more trouble than they’re worth: Much of the time during sailfish season, there’s so little wind that a boat would need to carry helium.

As further testament to the abundance of sailfish, consider that anglers hook most from boats drifting, quietly. Even when that drift barely moves the boat, sails generally find the baits in short order. Granted, we had slow periods when an hour would go by without a fish, and we would run farther out or head north or south to look for bird activity. But we also had long stretches when clickers would scream almost as soon as a bait hit the water.

Some anglers, notably from Japan, come here to throw poppers all day for sails. Often, their skippers will run-and-gun them to within casting range of sails on top. And while their numbers hooked will be considerably fewer than with bait, they do score. I know, seeing (and hearing the loud whoops) them hook up numerous times.

I was determined to hook a sail on one of the Berkley Powerbait Power Mullet soft-plastic minnows I’d brought and had the chance several times on different days. But none stayed attached to the bitter end, so I never did get to release a sail on a plastic bait. Still, it was a real kick to have them racing in to grab the lure.

Though we weren’t fly-rodding, teasing techniques here have begun to pay dividends. Pereira says Fishzone crews got that dialed in last year for the few fly-rodders they had out. “We’ve got the teasing mostly sorted out, now,” he says. They managed to help one Hong Kong angler who had never caught a sailfish release five on fly his first day out.

Mixed Bag in Spring; All Sails in Fall

The almost complete lack of other predators competing with sailfish off Rompin is another amazing aspect of this fishery. In fact, we caught only sails over several days, despite soaking many small, juicy live baits. We had one or two mackerel bite-offs in all that time. I caught a small cobia and a small narrowbarred mackerel on a little Crippled Herring jig.

We did see many schools of very small, fast-moving tunas, perhaps skipjacks, apparently feeding on the small baitfish (under birds) that we couldn’t spot, but even at that, no predators chased the skippies. Another surprise: We also spotted no cetaceans during our days offshore – not a single porpoise.

You’re almost certain to spot sea snakes, though – large, handsome fellows to remind you what a long way you are from Kansas or any place else around the United States.

Not only do these waters lack structure to attract a variety of species, the depth varies little. Despite running 25 miles out, we never exceeded 90 feet of water.

Still, it’s generally possible to sabiki up a few live baits almost anywhere as the boat drifts with a sailfish line or two out the stern. Granted, over some stretches, we couldn’t buy a bait – naturally during a red-hot bite as an initially meager livewell population dwindled quickly. Fortunately, Jensen and Sherman started finding a few of the red sea bream; those may not be the absolute bait of choice, but for this full-tilt sail bite, they worked just fine.

Pereira says the game-fish-variety quotient goes way up in the spring. The fishing season off Rompin runs from about mid-March into mid-November when the monsoon season’s rain and wind become an incessant fact of life. While you can expect to hook sails in spring and into summer, numbers won’t rival the late-summer/fall season. However, anglers take good mixed-bag catches, including small mahi, cobia, Spanish narrowbarred mackerel and trevallies. Pereira says a bit of chop is more common early in the season, but still seldom more than a foot or two.

We appreciated Fishzone’s strong conservation attitude, with a strict policy of carefully releasing all sails. Also, local preferences for seafood don’t extend to sailfish, so as far as I could tell, there’s not much commercial gear targeting sails – which is good for the sensational recreational fishery. However, Chris Tan, a Malaysian writer and angling enthusiast, cites ostensibly significant sailfish bycatch mortality in ikan bilis (anchovy) nets – a situation he hopes the Malaysian Fisheries Department will control.

Johnny Jensen, who first recommended fishing Rompin, flew in from Denmark to fish with us. When we hooked up almost immediately on the first morning, he told me, “This is my third trip to fish here. And this is three for three, the boat hooking a sailfish within the first five minutes on the first morning, every trip!”

Even though we fished late in the season, Pereira posted 14- and 18-sail days just after we returned to the United States.

If an angler wants big sailfish, Rompin’s not the world’s best destination. While not tiny, these sails seemed to run mostly in the 50- to 100-pound range. But for sheer numbers and action, in an exotic, safe location both literally and figuratively far removed from the rest of the world’s esteemed sailfish destinations, and one still unspoiled and largely unknown, you’d be hard-pressed to find any surpassing Malaysia’s east coast.

Among so much you’ll find to do and see when visiting Malaysia, keep in mind a visit to Tamana Negara. Translating simply as “National Park,” it’s the country’s largest rainforest preserve and one of the oldest in the world. We spent a couple of days there, walking the jungle (guided night walks can supplement diurnal treks), fishing the river and marveling at the famed canopy walkways suspended near treetop level. Acrophobics may want to find a different activity! You’ll find a wealth of information on the park by simply Googling it. One site you can check is www.tamannegara.org.

SF INSIGHT:

Sails Eat Peanuts

It may be that forage fish abound in Malaysia’s “sea of sailfish” but are too small to be immediately evident to anglers. As noted in the text, trawling for ikan bilis[[ITAL]] represented the only commercial activity we saw; the tiny anchovies used for fish meal seemed to be keeping several boats busy offshore – usually right on the sailfish grounds. I suspect the sails congregate there for the same reason as the net boats, and Malaysian angling enthusiast Chris Tan’s comment reinforces that: He cites assistance with some sailfish stomach analyses. “I saw mostly anchovies and small fish – only a few bigger stuff like squid or sardines.” Though these sails seem anything but shy about eating that bigger stuff with a circle hook in it, fly-rodders armed with anchovy-imitators should be poised for some great opportunities.

One bit of advice offered separately by both Dom Pereira and Anthony Sullivan: Replace stock treble hooks on big surface popping plugs with large, strong singles. Even though good trebles may be strong enough to hold a cartwheeling sailfish, they just seem to find it much more difficult to find purchase in a sail’s mouth than do singles, which offer a higher hookup rate. Japanese popping enthusiasts who visit Rompin customarily arm their poppers and stick baits with singles. Pereira says his operation can rig large poppers with two singles with points opposed 180 degrees in the current – an effective style of many Japanese and Korean anglers.

CONSIDERING A TRIP? QUICK FACTS

Where’s Malaysia? Malaysia is a large Southeast Asian country. While Malays make up much of the population, Indians and Chinese account for sizeable proportions.

How do I get there? Malaysia’s capital city, Kuala Lumpur (KL), is served by many major international air carriers including the country’s own Malaysian Airlines (www.malaysianairlines.com, one of only a few five-star airlines according to Skytrax, www.airlinequality.com).

What’s the main city like? KL, it’s modern skyline dominated by the bright-silver Petronas Twin Towers, among the world’s tallest buildings, is increasingly becoming a major center for shoppers from all over Asia, Australia and Europe. English is very widely spoken, passably if not always fluently. I had little idea what to expect; I found a clean, progressive and prospering city of striking new architecture and diverse and gracious people. In general, Malaysia proved a fascinating destination. From a culinary standpoint, food is a mélange of Indonesian, Chinese, Thai and Indian cuisines. Those who love highly spiced/flavored food will find this a large corner of heaven. I can’t imagine anyone coming over to Malaysia to fish without spending some time in KL.

When should I go? As noted, the fishing off Rompin starts in April, with prime time for sails under way by the latter part of July, and runs into early November when monsoons end the season.

What about money? Currency is in ringgits; even with the mighty U.S. dollar no longer so mighty abroad, accommodations and food remain good and often great bargains here.

Speaking of money, is this expensive? No. Granted, the thousand-dollar-or-so cost to fly across the big pond is a bit pricier than a jaunt to Central America or a Caribbean island. On the other hand, the price to fish here is shockingly cheap. To wit, at press time, Fishzone Sportfishing was holding with a seven-day (six-night) package for four anglers – five full days on the water – for $1,370 per person. That is truly inclusive (minus alcohol and gratuities – which will be minimal by American standards): You’re picked up at the airport, transported (the five hours or so) to Kuala Rompin, housed in a large condo (clean, comfortable and air-conditioned, if a bit austere), fed fabulously and provided with quality tackle. By way of comparison, I priced out some typical Central American fishing resorts and found rates for four commonly $600-750 per person per fishing day. The Malaysian package comes out to a bit more than $250 per fishing day.

What should I expect at Kuala Rompin? The large fishing village of Kuala Rompin sits on the coast by car a few hours southeast of Kuala Lumpur (mostly excellent highways) or a few hours north of Singapore. It’s notably undeveloped and a decidedly agreeable spot. We also found it free of biting bugs (which is good since we opted out of malaria prophylaxis) or other vermin, and the coastal temperature, even very near the equator, was generally very pleasant. (Exception: the middle part of the day when winds died – just be sure to drink a lot of water.

What should I bring? Fishzone supplies all tackle, but if you want to bring some, particularly if you’re fly-rodding it, you can. This year, the primary gear for anglers consisted of Shimano TLD20s with 50-pound braid. I prefer much smaller, lighter high-quality gear for these sails and brought a Shimano Trinidad 14 and Saragosa 4000 with 20-pound braid that worked perfectly (heavier would have meant giving up too much challenge and losing too much fight; any lighter would have put too much stress on the fish by increasing fight times unacceptably). However, also check with Fishzone: Pereira said they plan to add high-quality spinning gear to their arsenal for 2009. The operation prides itself on supplying everything for visiting anglers, “down to the sunblock.” Also, expect to gain weight since you’ll consistently be served amazing meals.

How do I book a sailfish trip? To book a trip, visit www.fishzone.com.sg, or contact Dominic Pereira at info@fishzone.com.sg or fishzonesportfishing@yahoo.com.sg. Pereira and partner Ian Pinto speak English fluently; they are well versed in and truly enthused about sport fishing. Their operation is set up so they sweat the details and let their anglers focus on fishing. They’ll pick you up at either Kuala Lumpur or Singapore airport, or in either city.

For more information: Tourism Malaysia – www.tourism.gov.my