Lewis Pearce arrived in Phuket in the spring of 2014 intending to stay for a season. Twelve years later he is still there, which will surprise nobody who has spent any time on the Andaman coast and made the mistake of going out on a charter in the right conditions. He arrived as a recreational angler with a decade of sea fishing behind him in Cornwall and the Scottish west coast; he stayed as a professional one.
For his first three years in Phuket he worked as a charter mate on a 38-foot Bertram out of Chalong Bay, a job that involved equal parts rigging leaders at four in the morning, translating for Japanese and Korean clients who had booked without any shared language, and learning the Andaman's seasonal rhythms from the Thai skippers who knew them best. The work was not glamorous. It was also one of the best fishing educations available in Southeast Asia, and Lewis absorbed it thoroughly.
He went freelance in 2017, writing initially for dive and travel publications before finding his subject matter: serious coverage of sport fishing in Thailand for anglers who want genuine detail rather than promotional copy. His focus sharpened around three disciplines — GT popping on the offshore reefs, sailfish on the southern banks during the November-to-April season, and deep jigging in the Andaman's underwater canyons and seamounts, a technique he picked up from Japanese crew members and has refined methodically ever since.
IGFA membership
Lewis is a current IGFA member and applies IGFA line-class standards to his tackle reviews and record research. When he references a "world record" claim in his writing, he has checked it against the IGFA database — a step many fishing writers skip.
He became an IGFA member in 2019, partly out of genuine interest in record-class fish and partly because he wanted credibility when writing about line-class records for the Andaman species. He has submitted several catches for IGFA consideration and holds a personal-best GT of 38 kg taken on a surface popper off Koh Bon, one of the rocky offshore outcrops that consistently produce large fish in the October-to-March window.
Lewis writes with a specificity that reflects his time on the water rather than in front of a screen. His gear reviews are based on tackle he has personally used in the field — the GT popping tackle guide on this site reflects two seasons of testing different rod blanks and popper designs under the kind of conditions that tell you quickly whether a product is adequate. His coverage of the sailfish season is drawn directly from logbooks he has kept since 2015, tracking dates, sea states, bait preferences, and the particular patch of the southern Andaman where the fish concentrate in January and February.
He lives in a small house in Rawai with a rod rack that takes up most of the spare bedroom and a standing arrangement with two of Phuket's better charter operators for discounted trips in exchange for honest coverage. He does not take advertising from charter companies, does not accept sponsored trips from tackle brands unless explicitly disclosed, and has turned down several PR opportunities that would have required him to soften a negative assessment.