Saturday Morning Bassin'

I headed back to Pingjhen with my son in tow to kick off the long holiday weekend. We managed eight bass, all in the 12 to 13-inch range. Josh even took a nineth with the landing net, but I don't think we'll count that one. The weather is warming up nicely. The bite wasn't as wide open as it was during the "super moon," be we weren't complaining. I had at least two well-meaning local anglers come up and inspect my wacky worm rig and try to tell me I was doing it all wrong. One guy wen't so far as to re-rig me on the spot before I could stop him. Ironically, it was another local that put me onto the wacky rig a few weeks ago. To be fair, if you have never seen a wacky rigged worm, it looks like the the kind of thing someone with no clue what they are doing would do with a plastic worm. 

Fishing Report: Baoshan Reservoir and Jinji Hu Fishing Pond

Baoshan Reservoir, Hsinchu County

Fishing Baoshan Reservoir near footbridge. No action, but at least the scenery was great.I headed into Hakka country for a little birthday fishing with my friend/coworker Patrick on Sunday. The weather had finally cleared up after nearly two months of chilly, rainy gloom. I had mapped out a few possible destinations and topping that list was Baoshan Reservoir in the foothills of Hsinchu County. It’s a picturesque little lake (not so little by Taiwan standards).

Most of the shoreline is accessed by well-maintained hiking trails, so the area seems to attract more weekend hikers than anglers. However, Baoshan is known to be one of the better fisheries in northern Taiwan for largemouth bass. The lake also supports healthy populations of tilapia, topmouth culter, mud carp and a few other species of carp.

We arrived at the reservoir around 8:30 a.m. and started our fishing near the dam. After an hour or so without any luck, we moved around the lake to the first suspension bridge (there are two pedestrian suspension bridges on the northern arm of the reservoir). We spent the rest of the morning bouncing lures off submerged trees and casting to schools of tilapia, but still no action.

While the fish at Baoshan may not have been cooperating this morning, one couldn’t complain about the setting. The area is lush and green, and teems with wildlife, including one very long snake spotted swimming across the cove. Birds are in abundance—cranes, egrets, herons and at least one pair of eagles. We, however, had come to catch fish, so we decided to pack it in and head for more productive waters.

Jinji Hu Fishing Pond, Pinghjen, Taoyuan County

First blood--a nice tilapia.Hoping to improve our chances, Patrick and I headed north to Taoyuan County to try a recreational pond I had read about on a local blog. Jinji Hu Fishing Pond is located on a country road between the townships of Lungtan and Pinghjen (though it is technically in Pinghjen). It is one of the few pay-to-fish ponds I have heard of that stocks largemouth bass and is fairly popular with the handful of local anglers who pursue this foreign import game fish. While most of these recreational ponds are concrete eyesores, Jinji Hu was a pleasant surprise. The area around the ponds is landscaped with grass. There are picnic tables and a shaded area, even a playground for the kids. What was originally a single large pond is now divided into two. Both are stocked with bass and tilapia and a few other species for which the locals only knew the Chinese names.

A very reasonable NT$300 gets you a whole day of fishing. The caveat is that you can only take home one fish per angler in your group, making it a mostly catch-and-release pond.  You also are requested to use barbless hooks or to at least to flatten the barbs on your hooks with pliers. This allows you to return the fish to the water with the least harm to the fish.

Patrick's first fish in 25 years. That rosy glow is half sunburn and half the result of seven Taiwan Beers.Ponds like this offer anglers a great opportunity to try different tactics and perfect their technique. Most of the bass are on the small side (one to two pounds), but the tilapia are quite large for the species. My first score of the day was a fat tilapia which I foul hooked in the belly (this seems to be a trend with me) with a swim bait. My first bass came after more than an hour of trying different lures and tactics. The bass are quite cagy for a stocked pond. Many have been caught and released more than once and tend to be cautious, particularly in the heat of midday. On several occasions, one or two bass followed my lure, even bumping it with their noses as it rested on the surface, before losing interest.

Patrick caught his first bass (his first fish in 25 years he later told me), on a small plastic grub and jighead rig. One of the pond’s regulars, Mr. Jiang, advised him to slow his retrieve to a near crawl and the advice paid off with a nice little two-pounder.

We found out later from the pond’s owner that Mr. Jiang is something of a legend in local bass fishing circles. He asked if he could look through my tackle box and then quickly dismissed most of what he found there. A pouch of plastic worms caught his eye and he told me to switch to these and showed me how to rig them “wacky style.” I had been fishing plastics on and off throughout the day rigged both Carolina- and Texas-style. He told me to remove the weight and use a simple #3 hook sunk midway down the length of the worm. It looked odd and was more difficult to cast without the extra weight. Casting distance didn’t really matter, however, since the fish were holding fairly tight up against the banks. He showed me how to work the bait with slow, gentle twitches. The payoff was immediate, and for the next 40 minutes I was hooking up on every three or four casts.

Mr. Jiang turned out to be a regular Jedi master when it came to local fishing lore, hinting that he may guide me to some of his “secret” spots in the future. This is what makes fishing recreational ponds so great—you get to meet and network with other anglers in a way that you probably wouldn’t out on more remote waters. Mr. Tseng, the pond owner, was as friendly as you could hope for and he really lit up when Patrick tried out a little Hakka with him. Pretty soon he was bringing us locally grown bananas, roasted pumpkin seeds and green tea from his private stock. He even offered to repair my rod tip, which I snapped reaching to lip-land a bass.

The pond owner, Mr. Tseng, shares some tea and angling wisdom.The pond attracts a nice mix of anglers. There was at least one guy pole fishing with a very typical Taiwanese bait fishing rig—umbrella, bowls of bait mix and chum, pole holder—who seemed to be landing a fat tilapia every five minutes. There were a couple of fly casters who were getting a lot of action on streamer fished along the bank. A fair number of dads had their kids in tow (at least one youngster fell into the pond and had to be fished out). The whole place has a nice family atmosphere and I’ll definitely be bringing the kids along next time.

Target Species: Largemouth Bass

Family: Centrarchidae

Scientific names: Micropterus salmoides

Common names: Largemouth bass, black bass, California bass (in Asia)

Chinese name: 大口黑鱸 (da kou hei lu, “largemouth black bass”)

Habitat: Freshwater lakes, ponds, reservoirs, large and medium rivers, canals

Size range: Up to 75cm, though adults over 40cm range would be considered large in Taiwan.

While considered the king of freshwater game fish in North America, largemouth bass fishing has not been pursued with quite the same level of enthusiasm in Taiwan. The species was introduced to the island through the aquaculture industry. Live bass can often be purchased as some of Taiwan’s larger supermarket chains. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, whether as fish farm escapees and/or fish planted by anglers themselves, the species eventually established healthy populations in local waters.

Today a growing number of Taiwanese anglers are catching “bass fever,” a fact reflected in the volume of bass-appropriate tackle showing up in local fishing retail chains. Many pay-to-fish ponds are now stocking largemouth bass to meet angler demand.

Taiwan’s (mostly) warm subtropical climate is similar to that of the southern U.S. were this species of bass flourishes, which explains why it has been successful as an invasive species. While many anglers may assume the warmer southern end of the island is the heart of Taiwan’s bass territory, this is not necessarily true. To be sure, there are plenty of bass to be found in the ponds, lakes and reservoirs of Tainan, Kaohsiung, and Chiayi counties, however Hsinchu and Taoyuan counties in the north also support healthy bass populations, as well. In fact, many of the ponds downstream from Shihmen Reservoir in and around the towns of Dasi and Longtan as well as the Taoyuan plain hold bass.

Largemouths are happiest in clean and fairly well-oxygenated water, and are not as tolerant of pollution and stagnation as tilapia or snakehead, with which they often share habitat. They tend to favor water with plenty of cover (aquatic plants) or submerged structures. Largemouth bass are more tolerant to variations in temperature than some other non-native species, tilapia and peacock bass in particular, allowing them to survive sudden winter temperature drops that can claim the aforementioned species.

Most anglers rely on artificial baits to stalk bass—plastic worms, crankbaits, swimbaits, spinnerbaits, etc. Matching lures to the available local forage is always a good idea and largemouth bass have been known to feed voraciously on juvenile tilapia. Bass strike hard and are strong fighters known for their acrobatic leaps.

Adult bass begin to spawn in late winter to early spring as water temperatures reach 15˚ C. Females build concave nests in 1.5 to 2.5 meters of water, which they will guard aggressively.

Video of the Day: Catching Barramundi and Grouper at Taiwan Fish Farm

Not sure where the coastal hotspots are for trophy fish? Don't own a boat? No worries! Taiwan supports one of the region's biggest aquaculture industries and many local fish farms will let you wet a line for a nominal fee--and you can keep and eat your catch guilt-free if you like.

I came across the video below on YouTube of a gent nailing a nice grouper and barramundi at a commercial pond. Where it is on the island I don't know, but I would love to find out if anyone does know.