Monsoon decided to hit a day before we were supposed to head out to the east coast for some light jigging which left me with 2 days void of fish fighting fix. To fill that itch, pond fishing would be the quick and dirty solution. A fishing buddy also recently acquired himself the super-fun ultralight combo tackle consists of the Evergreen Temujin 'The Spider' paired with a Shimano Stella 1000FE. It was a no brainer decision to hit the grouper pond for some stupid fun.
I'll let the pictures speak for itself. Enjoy!
Peek-a-boo - Jackall's TN50 in a compromised position. Taken on the drop!
Another shot of the TN50 in the kisser. Goal keeper grouper.
DUO's Realis Shad 59MR chased & attacked while bumping at the bottom.
Evergreen's Corsair 65 lightly twitched at the bottom was simply irresistible.
DUO's Tetra Works Perakko worked slowly taken without a doubt.
Feisty fella was aiming for the Perakko but missed!
Close call on the hook up and yet landed safely using the Perakko.
Grouper's favourite, Bassday's Nin Sui 6g.
Max fun on the ultralight Evergreen Temujin 'The Spider' & Shimano Stella 1000FE
DUO's Realis Crank M65 11A instantly sucked in digging about at the bottom.
IMA's Issen 45S? check!
Reeled in and landed safely using the lure's original puny fresh water hooks. Says a lot about the rod action and Stella's smooth drag.
DUO's Ikakko snapped up without hesitation, taken on the drop between jigs.
In too deep.
Unrecognisable, Evergreen's PropMagic 75 reeled slowly with occasional flashing twitches.
Head first!
Double whammy, with time to spare for a chat in between.
Evergreen's PropMagic 75 on the left, DUO's MOAB 85F with a twist tail add on.
DUO's MOAB 85F with a twinkle around its tail.
Don't head towards the light! Sucked in deep!
IMA's Ikuri 60 cranked slowly at the bottom.
IMA Ligid 70 in stealth neon colours attacked without hesitation too.
Here's something I can proudly tick off my bucket list of 'Japanese Twins'. Japanese made Shimano Twinpower SW series. Both of them would do great for some jiggy action, light and heavy stuff. The twins come loaded with quite a bit of 'Stella' bits and you get what you pay for. With a little bit extra effort, you can pimp it up to be 'there' with the 'Stellas'.
I'm preparing the twins to take on 2 different jiggy duties. One for the shallows in the east coast paired with Majorcraft's Giant Killing light jigging rod PE0.6-1.2 while the other takes on a PE4 rod for the deep around the straits.
The twins are both built tough to withstand quite a substantial amount of medium to heavy fish fights. They are also decently sealed from any water intrusion into the body. Bearings are all S-ARB variants that can withstand salt water corrosion for some time. Even so, it's always better to put in some extra precaution to pimp it up a bit with more/better lubrication and protection around areas that takes on most bashing and salt water intrusion.
Japanese Twins ready to be stripped down.
Upon stripping the twins down, just give it a nice gentle rub/brush down with marine grease for that little added protection on most surfaces. Make sure to avoid getting grease into the one-way bearings (anti-reverse) assembly but do give it a drop of one-way oil if necessary.
Plenty of 'Stella' trickle down goodies bar some minor bits which can be sourced and pimped up.
Line roller bearings take the most bashing as it is regularly loaded
with massive amount of torque on tiny ball bearings and these twins don't
come equip with water proofing seals like some of the more expensive
reels with fancy techs like Daiwa's magseal. Even with special rust
prevention coating on these bearings, high speed rolling and heavy
grinding will wear these coatings away over time and will result in
rusted and busted bearings. So, rub them down.
Marine greased up for maximum protection and smoothness in line rolling.
Surprisingly, the worm gear support uses teflon bushings both front and back. Weird things it that they made the front bushing like a sleeve and you cannot replace it with a bearing even if you want to. I've seen some folks drilling the body a little bit just to accommodate a bearing and I can see disaster written all over that kind of mod as the plastics around the front bushing housing will be too thin to support the bearings and the worm gear. The rear teflon bushing's easily replaced with bearings and shim to a glove like fit.
A tad of smoothy hybrid ceramic bearings (green) added to the worm gear support in place of its original teflon bushing and shims(red). Shimmed to a glove like fit. Both Japanese twins got the same smoothy treatment.
Shimano also decides to skim on the pawl support bits with teflon
bushings and not ball bearing supported for an improved smoothness and
longevity. Luckily, this can also be replaced with Stella sourced parts.
Standard teflon bushing from the twins (red), replaced with Stella bits (blue). Shims to tweak fitment (orange).
Here's another bit that's missing from the twins. The rotor lock nut, similar to the Stella, can house a bearing and sleeve for the support of the floating shaft and further beefing up of the reel's durability.
Seen here with an additional ceramic hybrid bearings, Stella sourced sleeve, and rotor lock nut with the bearing housing in view.
Here's how it looks like with bearing+sleeve assembly in the lock nut next to the rubber seal & protective cap.
These 2 twins should serve me well on my upcoming off shore adventures. Perhaps some bashing in-land to get it christened and wet!
The Shimano Ocea Jigger is an amazing reel, purpose built for jigging, and exceptionally built for tough fighting fish. There are 2 things that most people complain about this reel. Drag clicker noise and more drag power would be better.
It's got a unique drag clicker that sounds like a rattling toy, some
love it or some hate it, I'm not bothered with it. It's actually very
easy to disable if one is bothered, just pop open the 2 screws covering
the 'x-ship' plate under the free spool pressure knob and you will see
the clicker arm with a wire through from under the clicker arm. Just push the wire
through to the back to disengage the wire spring loaded needle and you
are set!
'X' marks the clicker spot.
Clicker arm powered by spring loaded wire from the main gear stack. Push the wire through to disengage and swing the clicker arm to the left and you've got yourself a clickerless jigger.
As for the drag washers, there are 4 in total and they are of different thickness across the entire stack, just make sure to match the thickness accordingly and you should be fine without having to deal with an oddly thicker stack of drag discs/washers that will push the outer most bearing too far out from the reel body housing.
Bags of smoothy goodie from Carbontex.
Out goes the standard puny drag washers (red arrows), in goes the bigger, brawnier carbontex washers (green). Purple arrow points to the spring loaded clicker generator discs.
Even if you decide to remove the entire clicker contraption, it doesn't affect the core function of the Jigger as it is bolted onto the main drag discs just to power a simple clicker arm.
A fishing buddy recently got himself a good deal for a seasoned Shimano Twinpower SW6000, good for jigging around Pulau Jarak. The deal comes with a brand new crank handle as the old handle suffered a weird injury of a lose crank/knob shaft (blue arrow). It's a rare kind of damage but will render further serious damages if left unchanged given the notorious fish fights we get at Pulau Jarak.
With the lose shaft, the entire shaft spins freely, which it shouldn't. This means that when you crank with load, you are generating massive amount of torque between the hardened stainless steel shaft against the aluminum arm. It's practically like drilling and prying through the hole, round and round.
This also means removing the screw that holds the knob and bearings in place a bit tricky as the screw's usually factory installed with a dab of thread locker (blue, medium strength). It had to degrease and clean off the back of the shaft (blue arrow). Upon drying, just dab super-glue sparingly between the stainless steel shaft and the aluminum arm, leave it out a bit to set. The screw comes off without much hassle once the super-glue sets in.
Cranky but lose around the blue arrow. Reddy tighty on the pin screw pointed out by the red arrow.
While the shaft that connects the arm to the reel body was a straight forward swap. It needed a coat of thread locker (red, heavy strength) on the pin screw (red arrow) thread and screwed in tight.
All the reel needs now is to hook some big bullies to be happy cranky & tighty again.
Here's a new addition to the family that needs no introduction, the Shimano Stella 1000FE. Before this little gem even sees sunlight, I'm stripping it apart to check out its innards, build quality and fitment tuning.
Here's the low down.
1000FE on the operating cloth fully loaded with 6lbs tuffline.
Drag force is super smooth with this one. Will drop in carbontex next for some more tests. Shielded bearing supported spool (upper), no nasty surprises there with aluminum wear.
Tiny line roller supported with 2 bearings, one is with special
coating, the other's plain looking with lots of shims in between to keep
load forces strictly on the bearings. Oiled, marine grease rubbed down
and packed in the roller assembly housing where you get the most
water(salt) intrusion here.
The finer details in finishing, usually on other reels the bail trip
wire is rested 'naked' on the rotor housing. This little fella comes
with a plastic protective sleeve to take on any wear abuse, if there
were to have any in this part of the reel.
Another bearing to support the spool (lower). No surprises here. Just needed bearing oil and marine grease rubbed down.
Rotor nut cap and rubber shields exposed, note the bearing that sits in the nut has a brass sleeve for a nice snug fit for the floating shaft. Not really sure why the shaft wasn't designed to fit using standard bearings without additional sleeves like the bigger SW8000 and above Stellas or Twinpowers.
The worse thing about this reel is the 'rear' chrome plastic cap that
has an obscure screw through the inside of the body covered with a
rubber cork. As the red arrow points, the plastic sleeve used in the body to tunnel the screw through. It's a hassle to remove the screw as you need to use quite a long reach precision screw drivers. Everything else is nicely shim fitted to as little free play as possible. Even the body screws comes with washers, something you don't see on any of the cheaper Shimano reels. All greased up with no tuning needed, yet.
"The Shimano Stella 1000FE pairs perfectly with an ultra light rod such as the Evergreen Temujin "The Spider" says evil friends around me. This combo seems to be 'THE' ultralight gear with powerful backbone and I've seen this combo in action hauling mekong cats the size of a golden retriever. Picture or it didn't happen!
I took the opportunity of a recent public holiday weekday to try this little combo out during the wee hours of the morning at a local paid pond. Upon arrival, there was no one to be seen and even the competitor pond was closed for business due to the public holiday. Luckily, this pond was open and the operator said that they've just reorganized the ponds according to species instead of mixing them up. 1 pond for finger mark snappers, 1 pond for Malabar groupers and the third for barramundis. And only 2 days ago, they've released 500 new fishes into each pond and not much have been fished out of the pond since as they were spooked and needed some time to get used to the new environment.
This calls for sinking subtle action lures to attract some strikes. As I combed through from the beginning of both grouper and snapper ponds, there wasn't a single bite or missed kisses. Slow to fast retrieves, twitches, long pauses, nothing seemed to work. Or perhaps the fish just wasn't where I expected them to be.
When I reached towards the end where so called 'fresh' sea water was being pumped in, that's when things start to get interesting in the grouper pond. I had a couple of missed strikes and botched hook ups when retrieved slowly. I then cast towards the same direction once again but tried a dead slow retrieve knocking on the bottom with extra long pauses. That's when the party started.
First victim using Evergreen's PropMagic 75 worked dead slow with extra long pauses. This little fella produced some feisty spurts of bull runs and took some drag when dialed to about 75-80% tight. This grouper weighs in at about 1.4kg, tasty fella too.
Second victim, 2 earlier botched hook ups but when cast into the same zone with longer pause, the grouper struck again and again so long as it's in front of their kisser. Small fella at about 1.3kg, released.
Third victim, or 4th, earlier bugger escaped when I was trying to land the bugger. IMA trip 66 worked super slow and occasionally letting it slalom drop down to the strike zone. This grouper tipped 1.8kg on the scales, released to fight another day.
5th or 6th, several misses earlier, but an extended pause registered nothing until I start to reel it back in to realize that the lure was already in the mouth swimming towards me. DUO Spinbait 80 worked as 'spybait' crawling the bottom. This little grouper almost straightened the split ring for the hook. Feisty fella at 1.4kg, released.
Another willing customer entertaining my DUO Spinbait 80 crawling the bottom near the grouper's congress party. Another fella at about 1.6kg, solid and tasty when steamed with soy sauce.
The groupers were mostly congregated around a small area towards the end of the pond and I had a blast hauling these little bulls using this ultralight ultra-powerful combo with little hassle. Now I understand why this is 'THE' ultralight gear that is a must have for our application here.
A few weeks earlier, while on a holiday trip to Perth, I managed to hook up with a friend of a friend's who owns a boat and he was super kind to bring us out for a quick half a day's jigging in the shallows. Weeks prior to the trip, we kept a tight watch over the seasonal change that resulted in unpredictable weather. Just few days before the trip, I was visiting down south and experienced winds in excess of 140kph, ripping trees off the ground taking down power lines and a gas station.
Fortunately, the weather calmed down a bit and 2 days prior to the day trip, wind and tide forecast indicates conditions that are OK, not ideal, to head out to the shallow reefs and drop a couple of jigs in the hopes that the samson's still there. The swells were quite pronounced up to 4-5 meters at times with winds up to 12 knots with a forecast of picking up to 15 knots later in the morning. A small window of opportunity and we took it.
With his speed boat, we were at our first spot just under 30 minutes, the sounder was quite bare with occasional schools of baits as we cruise around a bit looking for bigger blotches. We decided to drop some jigs regardless and aimed at demersals at the bottom instead.
Upon several jig drops and knocking on the bottom, we managed to hook up a couple of pesky scorpion fish and a small dhufish, not the legal size basically. It was rather difficult to snap any pix as it was very rocky and not the smartest thing to mess with a scorpion fish.
With a GoPro latched on the other side of the boat, I managed to capture some decent fights of my mate using my pimped out Shimano Stradic 6000FJ paired with a Giant Killing PE3 rod.
The best part about this short trip out? A pair of humpbacks came to check out our pimped out tackle!
Tiny Samson but BIG on fight to the end. The pimped out Stradic didn't break a sweat.
Feisty sambo was no match for the pimped out tackle.
Hook in mouth, jig slapping the cheeks, surrendered.
There was no big Sambos to be found, skipper took pity and gave us his pink snapper instead.
Another small Sambo with BIG fight all the way to the tip of my pimped out Ocea Jigger & Giant Killing Long Fall. No contest, didn't even take any drag but sure as hell worth more than its weight.
Short but strong fight all the way to the top.
While jigging, we heard puffs and big splashes not far from where we were jigging and we saw a pair of humpbacks swimming around us. Never would we imagine to be able to witness any whales and they were UP CLOSE! We were awestruck and gaped at the sheer size of these gentle giants and forgot about our jigging.
The humpbacks decided to come even closer to check us out, occasionally peeking out of the water with a curious stare keeping the calf at bay. The video above shows how close they were to the boat, iPhone video with no zoom and no post processing, as it is. With so many years of OZ offshore fishing, never have my mates seen any this close.
The curious whale experience alone was worth the short and unfruitful jigging trip. I'll surely be back to hunt these famous big sambos when the time is right.
