We’ve been doing Island Stay trip around Aguni Island before. But the restaurant who cooked our foods with our catch went out of business in March 2019. We know many of you look forward to dinners with your catch. Also, the owner of the restaurant was the key person for us to provide boat docking and transportation. Now that we don’t have him and Aguni has such limited resources that we decided we cannot continue our operation with Aguni.

We’ve been looking for an alternative destination and managed to get good connections to one of our most desired islands, Ie Island. We now have the docking permission, lodges, transportation and a restaurant to cook our catch.

From Ginowan, Murubushi home dock, Ie Island is just about far as Aguni, 2-hour+ trip. Ie is close to the main island of Okinawa and there are 4 daily ferries from Motobu. Ie has much more resources like lodging, restaurants and shops, and transportation like rental cars and taxies. With easy access from main island, surrounded by beautiful coral reefs and grounded on flat land for agriculture, Ie Island has some nice tourism to offer. We decided that Ie would make a good base for our island stay trip.

Ie Island is a nice fishing ground for various targets like groupers, amberjacks, snappers, jobfish and doggies. Great for bottom fishing and Oyogase fishing with live bait fish. It’s also famous for light casting game for blue emperors over the reef.
If the weather allows, we can go up further north to Izena and Iheya island, 1 to 1.5 hours away. A supreme fishing ground for bottom fishing, Oyogase, jigging, and GT popping.

Fishing conditions are about the same everywhere.

Jigging is good from 80m to 150m. The deeper the better usually.
Oyogase is good from 60m to 120m. Coral trout can be targeted around 60m – 80m. Other fish like groupers, amberjacks, jobfish, and doggies can be hit at any depth. The goat fish (the bait) can only survive no deeper than 130m.
Bottom fishing is also good at the same depth as Oyogase. But under 70m, there are too many peckers to steal your baits.

Most fishing spots are between 80m to 120m. At this depth, you can do any of your choice of jigging, bait fishing, and Oyogase. If you have joined us for Aguni trip before, fishing conditions are all the same.

The only difference from Aguni trip is that there’s no payao nearby for tuna fishing. If you want to do casting, there is a good GT area at 50m around Izena. Also, there are coral reefs for light casting game for blue emperor at 10m around Ie. If you want to do these games, some of of you can cast in the bow, some can do Tai-rubber, Inchiku or micro jigging in the back.

Logistics

Typically, we meet in Ginowan at 8:00am and the boat will take to you Ie Island on Day 1.
But if you wish, you can take a ferry ride to Ie Island with your rental car from Motobu a day before, and Murubushi will pick you up around 10:00 at Ie port.

We book a basic lodge near the port. There are different types of rooms like singles, doubles, and triples and we let the lodge arrange our rooms, according to the vacancy. Please let me know if there’s a couple or ladies in your group so that we can arrange the rooms accordingly.

There’s a resort hotel too. There are rooms for double occupancy and also villas for groups. The lodging & dinner fee will be from JPY18,000. It depends on rooming and seasons. Please consult with Totos.
YYY Ie Resort

We will arrange all our dinners during the trip. We will go to a Izakaya-style restaurant who cook our catch whenever possible.
There are 24-hour convenient stores on the island where you can buy drinks and meals on the boat.