Adrenaline magazine - Oct 2008

Fish Ao Nang - Gillham's Fish Resort

Monster-fishing, Thai style.

When entrepreneur Stuart Gillham needs to explain the location of his Amper Muang fishing resort, he says: “near the dirt mound and the building site”. If that makes you suspect that the resort itself might be a bit of a tip, understand that, consciously or otherwise, Gillham is following the business adage that says: “underpromise and overdeliver”.

	The 53-year-old’s baby is a dazzling, impeccably-landscaped, 120-million-Baht, 26-acre effort atmospherically enhanced by the presence of gigantic karsts (limestone crags) standing sentinel in the background. It results from drive and devotion in the face of natural challenges, not least the king cobra that had to be exterminated after it made a meal of a few of the 700 fish.
Armed with five mechanical diggers, Gillham’s team embarked on the project in November 2007 and worked seven days a week, day and night in shifts. Because of the pressure, more than once, Gillham and his family considered just filling the land in and going home.
	But now the farm is almost finished. It is worth seeing, partly because among Gillham’s giant shoal are 10 species of record-breaking super-heavy fish. That’s about 60 individual fish. Shedding light on these prodigious statistics, Gillham says that he filled the lake with vast quantities of natural food before stocking it. Also, he admits, he just bought in many readymade giant fish from other farms.

Adrenaline Magazine spoke to Stuart about the art of angling, walking on water and a Jaws-like Amazon monster that inspires obsession.

Adrenaline: What was the inspiration for your resort?

Gillham: I’d fished around the world and stayed at fantastic places with awful fishing and at awful places with fantastic fishing – you just never knew which you would get. There are plenty of lakes in Thailand with big fish in, but they’re mostly ugly square holes which don’t have good surroundings. Some have nice accommodation, but the fish are small. So we said, ‘What would everybody want?’ The answer we came up with was big fish, nice accommodation and pretty gardens. This is a place where a guy can come alone and do little else than have mammoth battles with huge fish. Or he can bring his family and spend quality time with them in between the fish fights. We’re catering for just about everybody with an interest in fishing, really.

Adrenaline: And how do you source the fish?

Gillham: I’ve got an agent. He travels all round Thailand looking for big fish. Strange job he has really, negotiating the price of mammoth fish: there’s not exactly a huge market for them. In fact, I think I may personally have significantly pushed the price up by stocking my lake. Maybe we need an options and futures market, where people can place bets on the price of a 100kg giant carp in a year’s time. Well, Thailand already has more bizarre things - diving with elephants and shopping with sharks, to mention just two.

Adrenaline: What’s the most expensive fish you stock?

Gillham: The most expensive and hardest to find, believe it or not, is the Siamese carp, which sells for around 1,000 Baht a kilo and is on the endangered species list now.

Adrenaline: What is your most popular fish?

Gillham: Certainly, the arapaima are the headline fish that almost everybody comes for. They’re the fish that guys travel from all over the world to try and catch. We have a guy coming here who has spent 20 years of his life trying, on-and-off and unsuccessfully, to catch an arapaima. He has just been given six months to live, due to a terminal illness. So he phoned me up and asked how long he should stay here. Generally, if you fish here for five days, you’ll catch an araipama. So we’ve said nine days and we shall pull out all the stops to catch him his arapaima. This guy’s not going to get a return holiday. We have 60 fishing rods here and, if needs be, we’ll put the lot out.

Adrenaline: How rare are araipama?

Gillham: They’re very, very rare in most of the wild. They were brought to Thailand probably 20 years ago for the aquarium trade. They grew too big for the aquaria. The Thais took them out and threw them in ponds. Thailand just totally suits them. They are becoming extinct in Brazil but are numerous in Thailand. They grow from nothing to a metre long in just a year.

Adrenaline: So what’s the secret of catching arapaima?

Gillham: Patience. You put a bait in the water and they’ll look at it for four or five hours and then decide whether to eat it or swim off. When you catch one, because it’s so big and because of its temperament, it takes five guys to tackle it.

Adrenaline: Arapaima are said to be very aggressive.

Gillham: That’s right. In the fish farms in Brazil, over ten kids a year are killed by arapaima. One of only two fish in the world which can swim backwards (the other is the Wells catfish), it launches itself at you like a battering ram and smashes into you with its bony, prehistoric head.

Adrenaline: Everything about this fish seems to be weird. How does it breed?

Gillham: When the arapaima spawn, the female opens her mouth quickly and inhales but does not swallow her young. Then she grows white tubes down her body, and the tubes are what the fish feed on for the first month of their life. The females stay close to the surface, the males swim around to protect them. We could see a female under the surface in October when they spawned. We sent a Thai boy who works here out in the boat to scoop the net alongside this female fish and get some babies. As the boy came alongside, the big male (150 kilos and 10-feet-long) attacked the boat, rammed it and turned it upside down.

Adrenaline: What did the boy do?He just ran across the top of the water. I thought only Jesus could walk on water, but this kid did it. He was out in seconds.

Adrenaline: Sounds a bit implausible, Stuart.

Gillham: You weren’t there. There are some plants growing in the water, which presumably supported enough of his weight as he ran.

Adrenaline: What’s the secret of catching fish in general?

Gillham: Patience. A few other things are important in fishing, like location - if you watch a lake and you watch it long enough, you will see that there is a particular fish which keeps showing itself in a particular place. So then you realize this fish lives in this little spot. Then it’s just down to patience.

Adrenaline: Lures or bait?

Gillham: Lures aren’t that effective. Well, they are in new water when the fish have never been targetted. Once they have been caught once on a lure, they are pretty clued-up. So, I would say bait. Dead sea-fish are really good - especially when the target fish has grown up in a fish farm and has got used to feeding on sea-fish.

Adrenaline: Is there a particular bait that does it every time?

Gillham: No, but any oily sea fish is good for the predators. Carp and Mekong catfish like maize and paste balls more.

Adrenaline: Many of your fish, like the arapaima, are rare. How conservation-conscious are you?

Gillham: All fish are catch-and-release. We have got sea-eagles and kites coming in here every day feeding, as well as giant kingfishers. The more the resort is becoming established, the more wildlife is coming here. My workers are all under strict instructions: no one is allowed to kill anything.

Adrenaline: Won’t the birds kill your fish?

Gillham: My fish are safe. My fish would probably eat the eagles.

	His Royal Highness the King of Thailand is great on conservation. His Royal Highness is simply brilliant. He is now patronising a programme of restocking the Mekong River with Mekong catfish. To date, I think something like 3 million cat fish have been reintroduced to the wild. The Thais have promised His Royal Highness that they will stop netting catfish. The respect and reverence for His Royal Highness is so great that I think they will stop doing it. So I think Mekong catfish have a chance of recovery. The Siamese Carp, the other huge fish in Thailand, is badly over-fished. I hope that someone will suggest to His Royal Highness that he includes them in a future fish protection project. It’s not too late to save them, if someone as amazing as His Royal Highness were behind the project, I’m sure it would happen.
Siamese carp don’t travel well. Once they are in a lake and have settled in, it just doesn’t suit them to be moved. Perhaps they miss their fishy friends. Who knows, they live a long time, so maybe long-lived fish like them can make friends with other fish. Or maybe they have an age-based pecking order, which is upset if they are moved. Or maybe they’re just like me and prefer to sleep in the same spot every night if at all possible.
	The easiest fish to move is the arapaima. It is a fish which breathes the air of the atmosphere, not air dissolved in water as other fish do. It is the oldest and the biggest-scaled fish on the planet. Arapaima are known to go back about 30 million years. They come from the River Amazon. So, when the Amazon floods, they go into the jungle hunting for food. As the water recedes, they get trapped in ponds. All the other fish die from lack of oxygen when the ponds became stagnant, but Araipama can last six months without food and live in stagnant, polluted ponds because they breathe air. They are a pretty unique kind of fish.

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