Fishing places
Asia and the Indo-Pacific
The centre of marine biodiversity, the deepest traditions of fishing anywhere, and the widest gap between what is fished and what is written down in English.
Being listed here is not permission to fish.
Access, fishing rights, seasons, licences, local bylaws and permitted methods vary and can change. Check the current rules and permission for the specific water before fishing. FishingHQ describes what the ground is and names who holds the answer; it does not hold the answer itself, and it does not tell you where to go and catch a fish.
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- 13 fishing regions and destinations
- 0 publicly documented places
Regions and destinations
Each of these is a full guide: what fishing there is like, what dominates, the water available, how the rules are structured and who administers them.
- East Asian fishingThe most intensively fished seas on earth, wrapped around the most technically inventive angling cultures — where a great deal of the tackle the rest of the world uses was designed, and where the pressure on the stocks is correspondingly extreme.
- JapanAn archipelago with more coastline than continental countries many times its size, the deepest recreational fishing culture in the world by participation and specialisation, and the origin of a large share of the tackle and method vocabulary everyone else uses.
- KoreaOne peninsula between two seas that could hardly be less alike: a shallow, turbid, enormously tidal west coast and a deep, clear, current-fed east coast, with fishing cultures to match.
- Mauritius and RéunionTwo volcanic islands a few hundred kilometres apart in the open Indian Ocean, with deep water immediately offshore, a lagoon on one and almost none on the other — and a big-game fishery built on a seamount rather than on a coast.
- South-East Asian fishingThe centre of the world's marine biodiversity and the largest inland fishery on earth, feeding hundreds of millions of people — and the region where the gap between a visiting angler's experience and the everyday reality of fishing is widest.
- Sri LankaA tropical island with reef, surf and estuary on the coast and an ancient network of man-made reservoirs inland — one of very few destinations where a visitor can seriously fish both salt and fresh from the same base.
- ThailandTwo coasts on two different seas, a river system draining into both, and a freshwater fishery organised in a way that exists almost nowhere else — commercial lakes stocked with the largest fish on earth.
- The Coral TriangleThe centre of marine biodiversity on earth, where more reef fish and coral species occur than anywhere else, and where the world's largest small-scale fishery works on top of them.
- The Himalayan mahseer riversSnow-fed rivers falling off the Himalaya into the Gangetic plain, holding a migratory carp that reaches enormous size and became the subject of one of angling's oldest conservation arguments.
- The Indian subcontinent coastsA coastline where the wind reverses twice a year, taking the currents, the upwelling and the whole fishery with it — and where several million people fish from beaches with no harbour at all.
- The MaldivesA double chain of coral atolls with almost no land and no rivers at all, whose national fishery catches tuna one fish at a time on a pole and line and has done for centuries.
- The Mekong systemThe largest inland fishery on earth by catch, organised around an annual flood pulse and a lake that reverses the direction of its own river every year.
- The Ryukyu IslandsA thousand kilometres of subtropical coral island chain trailing south-west from Japan, where the fishing has more in common with the Philippines than with Honshu and the culture was a separate kingdom.
FishingHQ does not yet hold granular place records for Asia and the Indo-Pacific. The regions above are the current coverage — the place tier began in Britain and Ireland and has so far reached continental Europe.