Anything but big cats!

Once again we're in between offshore trips, last minute cancellations and a sudden development of an itch pushes us find avenues to cure that itch. On such short notice, we regularly hit the pay ponds and this particular pond was rather famous for it's variety of fresh water species and large inhabitants. We've grown accustomed to regularly landing decent cats and sometimes it is just too predictable and repetitive.

What we did this time was to set upon ourselves to target everything but the big cats and put our ultralight gear to the test with a variety of tactics specifically to land new catches. Catches weren't epic but we did manage to surprise ourselves with a nice variety to show off.

Boy vs Fish. Sultan on Evergreen's PropMagic75, gently reeled in to not mess up its fragile mouth using Daiwa Emeraldas & Majorcraft's Go-emotion light spinning rod.

We were literally sweeping systematically across as many water column as we can cover and many more surprises ensues to keep our hopes up for catches anything but big cats.

A surprise take, nicely loaded Temujin 'The Spider'.

A common carp, a rare fatty common carp, a rare catch in this pond!

IMA's Spingulf seems to be racking up species after species here, amazing!

We did as best as we can to target anything but big cats, little did we know that we managed to find ourselves a loop hole interpretation of anything but big cats. These weren't big cats. Cats but not big cats. Passable by our standards.

While the heavy geared boys were hauling up pesky big red tails, This Bassday Nin Sui jigged about the bottom landed this little fella.

Nin Sui in the gob, nothing fancy, just bottom jigging, short to medium intervals.

Another small and skinny cat on the Nin Sui.

When we were about to wrap up our session for the day, I managed to get a hit from something big. I guess there's no escape here in hauling big cats and we have nothing to complain about since we've caught a variety of smaller specimens earlier. I take this as a nice send off from the pond to put a zonker at the end of this ultralight setup of Temujin the 'Spider' paired with a Shimano Stella 1000FE spooled with 6lbs line.

Boy wonders what's he doing fighting with that tiny stick.

Wonder no more, one of the redtail bullies attempting to out run my tackle. Ultralight, but packs a mighty fight!

IMA's Spingulf is the way to go here for all sizes of fish here.

I'd say we did pretty good for ourselves and met most of our expectations to catch 'anything but big cats' with a few creative interpretations of our own mandate. Once again, the ultralight setup of Temujin the 'Spider' + Shimano Stella 1000FE does pack a mighty fight.