Arapaima Fly Fishing at AmazonBKK Bangkok Thailand

Sunset in the horizon over the skies. Nice.

I don’t know about Bob, but coming from the recent twin tragedies of the Malaysian Airline flights, namely MH370 and MH17, I am a little nervous taking another MH flight into Bangkok.

Having said that, the sunset scene from the skies over Bangkok city was breathtaking and took my mind off the jitters.

Our flight landed in the early evening hours in Bangkok from Kuala Lumpur with Bob having flown in straight from Sydney.

View of a section of Bangkok city from the skies in the evening

Understandably, Bob must be really tired from all that traveling. I know I would. Our plan was to check in straight into the hotel and will leave at 0400 hrs the next morning on a 2 hours drive to our first destination, AmazonBKK pond.

In hindsight, it may have been better for us to spend one extra day in Bangkok just hanging out so that Bob could be better rested and better prepared for the two days of fly-fishing sessions for mega-sized fishes.

A short wooden bridge divides the pond and this add to the challenge as big fish will make a dash across underneath

If you want to catch arapaima in the wild (who doesn’t?), you need to either invest in a fair bit of time and spend a bundle of cash and head to the Amazon rivers of South America which would be quite an adventure.

One of the other good alternative is to head to Thailand where you can be quite certain to land at least one arapaima. Possibly more as there are quite a few around in the many ponds across the country. At last count this particular operator claimed there are more than 150 arapaima in their pond (very believable when you look at the place) with a good number of fish exceeding the 100kg (220 pounds) mark.

Arapaima are most active here early in the day. Many can be found at the edges of the pond.

You can often see many arapaima rolling over the surface

Roughly 2/3 of the pond is separated by a wooden bridge and yes, the big arapaima knows how to make use of it.

Always quite a sight to watch big fish rising

This trip is a prelude to Bob’s sailfish fishing trip at Kuala Rompin, the third consecutive year Bob’s fishing with JW.

It’ll work as a way to get a little bit more familiar to the new heavy tackle that he’ll be using. Bob managed to hook a couple of arapaima and landed an impressive variety of fish species at AmazonBKK. However, landing an arapaima eluded him this time.