After some brief early morning rain the day turned into a hot and humid scorcher. That said we are lucky in that there is normally some sort of breeze on the Lake. Any rain at the moment is most welcome and Songkran is normally a time for a bit of the wet stuff.

For those that don’t know Songkran is the Thai New Year’s national holiday that occurs on 13^th April every year. It is the most important holiday and the Thai government normally give up to 5 days off to enable the people to travel and spend time with their loved ones and pay respect to their elders.

Sadly for the last 2 years there has been no celebrations  due to Covid. If you are here for Songkran then be prepared to get wet . The water festival is a fun event met with thronging crowds, armed with buckets and water pistols spaying water on all and sundry.

Amazingly we are now at Battle of the Bars 9. As well as the usual 4000 baht  1^st prize this event carried an additional prize for the biggest fish, thanks to Pallatrax. These matches are  fun events for locals to socialise and enjoy the TopCats hospitality but they are also a good vehicle to continue testing of Pallatrax innovative and safe products. The Gripz wide gape really is winning universal praise as great all-rounder and we will continue to work with them on hook technology, so watch this space. The guides here are also raving over the Gamma line .We are standardising on the 0.53mm diameter Polyflex which is an amazing 51lb breaking strain. The low memory and its resistance to abrasion are other key features for us.

In many ways this was a strange event. Strangely the normally prolific redtail cats (Amazon and Asian varieties) were not feeding at all, in fact only one was caught as last fish of the day. It was a superb one though caught by Foster, the owner of the Boat Bar, fishing from Redtail Haven with Casey.

Normally, the Heaven’s Point is a prolific peg but with 2 very experienced anglers there it produced just the one fish

22 fish were caught in the 4 hours , with an average weight of 44lb each. 7 species were caught but this was predominantly a carp match with  the Siamese Carp were on the feed as usual , these street fighters of the lake made for a nail biting end as any of three teams could have won it with a fish in the last minutes.

With Rob Ferry, counting down the seconds Coco Beach Bar, eventually  pulled off the win from the Coconut Peg with 6 fish for 280lb .We must give a special mention to Rob’s latest partner , Freddie who was fishing at TopCats for the first time and landed Tyson and then the biggest fish of the day, one of our smaller Arapaima who Super Ben estimated as just short of the magical 100 lb mark

Result

1^st Coco Beach Bar   Coconut Peg    280lb

2^nd Boat Bar              Redtail Haven  230lb

3^rd Izzys Bar              Carp Channel    205lb

League Table after 9 rounds: