Fish The Pain Away!

Feeding Frenzy at the Bintulu Oil Rigs.

- Eddy Chong

This is my fishing experience mid last year at the oil rigs and Luconia off Bintulu on board Marine Harvest. It was a really exciting trip epitomed by numerous feeding frenzies, and is one of, if not the best contact actions I have ever experienced, even though I had to bear with my awful back pain which seemed to disappear miraculously at the onset of the trip!

James, our ever reliable fishing organizer managed to secure the booking of Marine Harvest in Bintulu for a 4-day fishing trip to the offshore oil rigs of Bintulu and the Luconia shoals.

He was leading a group of 9 anglers departing from Johor Bharu and I managed to organize a group of 6 departing from Klia2. In my group was Charlie Looi, coming all the way from Sydney. Charlie is a real cool senior citizen angler and had organized 2 wonderful fishing trips to the Great Barrier Reef Australia which I had the pleasure to join (Rod and Line Sept 2014 and Aug 2016 issues.)

Painful anticipation

Before I start telling my story, I must say that I have never had so much stress and worries in any fishing trip than this one!

You see, in anticipation of the monster size GTs and Dogtooth which I had seen from the recent photos taken on board Marine Harvest, I thought I better toughened up a bit. I have had numerous encounters with big fishes and worriedly remember the times that I had to fight sitting down or passing on the battle to my friends because of this sharp pain in my lower back whenever I encountered a prolonged fight with the fish.