Fishing in the Yellow / West Sea

Last weekend I went out on a fishing trip Brian Wiscombe (WEC resident) and a two guys from Doosan. We left from Changwon around 10pm Saturday night to make the drive up to a port by Taean.

It took about 4 hours to drive there, and that was with rather empty roads (since it was late and all). Once we got into town we had breakfast at a local place (soup / rice) and then slept for a few hours till we could check in with the boating office. Around 4am we checked in, got any extra equipment that we had forgotten / needed (poles, hooks, bait, ponchos, etc) and then moved all of our stuff onto the boat. Around 5am we left the harbor and traveled out to the first fishing spot, a trip that took about 3 hours. We started fishing / battling the rain around 8am and kept fishing around 6pm that night. After that we came back to the harbor, packed up our gear and fish and made the trek home. All in all a really long, kind of cold / rainy day, but we ended up catching a lot of fish (as you'll see in the pictures) so it was a pretty good time.

Also I found out that I do get a bit seasick, mostly when we were at low idle and the boat was really kicking around. I was ok traveling out (except for when we throttled down b/c of waves) and fishing for the morning, but it really hit me in the afternoon. I'm not sure what all it was (the long day, the waves, maybe not eating enough, or a combination of everything) but I was really sick / tired all afternoon so I mostly slept.

We ended up catching 20-25 fish on the day (between the 4 of us). I caught 3-4 in the morning and then another one during lunch, but that was it. One of the Doosan guys with us also got a little sick and he sat most all of the day out (he did catch a fish though). Most of the fish were 12ish inches but Brian caught the biggest one on the boat probably around 16-18". You can see in the pictures below and then take a guess if you like.

We were mostly fishing off the bottom of the Sea about 30-50m down (100-170 ft), so we had extra weighting on the lines and we also used two hooks with different bait at different heights. Most all of the fish that I caught was off of the lower hook / bait. You can see that a few guys were able to catch two fish at once (first picture in the album below) because of the two hooks. The boat was pretty good sized (you'll see in the pictures) and had space for 22 fishers at once.

These pictures are from the boating company itself, a rather neat service that they provide. The deckhand was running around snapping pictures as we hauled fish in, so he had a pretty busy day. It should be pretty easy to pick out Brian and I since we're the only Americans, Mr. Kim (also with us) is in the third picture and then about 7 more... he had a pretty good day. We guessed that the average person caught 4-5 fish, but that might not have been the case.

And these pictures are what Brian and I took throughout the day. I've added more comments on each of those pictures too, so be sure to check them out.