Always scary fishing at the end of December in Airlie, and sure enough, we got rained on. But it wasn’t too bad and was one of the best trips we had done.
As soon as we moored up I dropped some bait over the side and pulled up a 45cm sweet lip – my favourite. No one could believe that was where I got it, but hey, I’m just a pro.
If I hadn’t gone so hard on the piss the first night I might have been able to fish a great spot where my mate Judda pulled up Indonesian Snapper after Indonesian Snapper. All thanks to my home burley I will assume.
Good fun.
Got some huge crabs
Never thought I would be uploading this photo on a website, check out the abs
A good friend of mine was having a 30th, so they decided to do a camping trip at Dugong Beach on Whitsunday Island. It is home of the famous Whitehaven Beach, but it is a huge island, and one isn’t really accessible from the other. “Damn” I thought.
Well I turned out to be wrong. It was, and still is, the best place I have camped. The beaches were amazing, great sunset, fishing (I only managed a small bream, despite the all the effort), crabbing, a great bushwalk up to a lookout that could only seen to be believed.
Not trying to sound conceited but the photos taken are not photoshopped in anyway, taken on the “auto” setting of a Canon Powershot D10. It looked way better than they seem.
And the trip was great, great chat, lots of people, everyone just having a ball. How could you not? The place was paradise.
This was back in April of 2011 and I lived in Airlie Beach. We had had a particularly heavy wet season, and for the first time ever Peter Faust dam had started to overflow. People were going up there to look at it, sort of a semi-tourist attraction. But word quickly filtered around that all the barra, were getting swept over the top of the dam, rumor had it that if you could get to the bottom you would be in for an epic session.
Up until then I was mostly a dead bait and reef fisherman, I had never caught a barra. So me and my mate Tony decided to head there. Sounded simple, but it was a last minute decision, we only had a few hours, and we forgot a few things. And when we got there we found out that most of it was locked behind barbwire fences. We found a route down that never said “do not trespass” so we figured if we weren’t crossing any restricted areas we would be okay.
We got down there to discover we didn’t bring:
– Suncream
– A landing net, fish grippers, or anything that might make getting barra from a very steep incline easier
– A tape measure
– An esky (we assumed all the fish would be inedible)
We brought the camera and some rods and that was about it.
Tony hooked a barra with his second cast. He got about three before I got my first one. I would be interested to know what people thought about eating it… it is fairly silver, and to me, looks edible.
I got three in total, Tony got about 7.
But the story of the day was the big girl that Tony hooked. He took my pliers and made an indent on his rod, and later measured it to be 137cm. Here is the snap I took, with a normal canon powershot d10 camera (no photoshop or fancy lenses or anything)
Most of the barra had marks on them from the damage they had taken going down the concrete dam. Right at the end of the day, I hooked a horse of my own. I fought it for a while, but it managed to get my line tangled in some trees with a clever jump. Tony climbed the tree to get it untangled, even fell in the water. However the line must have become worn on the wood, and it broke soon afterwards. This (and more) was captured on Tony’s go-pro:
So what happened after that? Well I wanted to go back, but I found out later that you weren’t allowed anywhere there. Security had stopped warning fisherman and started prosecuting them. But the main reason I never went back was because of this: Queensland Rocked By Earthquake
We didn’t think much of it at the time, but we were literally at the bottom of a dam when an earthquake hit.
So I decided to be thankful for what I had, not venture down there again, and just have a memory of a 2 hour barra session that likely won’t be repeated.
We were fishing in Mackay and I was pretty excited. The bad news was that it is nearly a two hour drive to Mackay meaning we were up at 4.30am, essentially cancelling any Saturday shenanigans. And what an eventful day it was!
There was me, Judda, Charlie and Craig+Naomi. In front of everyone, Stuart the fishermen, goes right ahead and gets sea sick! All I did for the first two hours was contribute homemade burley off the back of the boat, pretty bloody embarrassing. It was a very quiet day fishing-wise, the quietest most of them have had. (Dad – since Charlie was taking us out I made lunch for everyone, including 12 bananas. I told them the theory and have been banned from taking bananas from now on).
I only caught a little fella that had to be thrown back, a few caught smaller fish. We only got one eating fish for the day. The highlight was Craig hooking a monster, fighting it for 5 minutes before it beat him. A few minutes later Judda hooks a monster, fights his heart out and get him on board. Not only has Judda managed to hook the fish through the gills, but there, in his mouth, is Craig’s lure! It was a mother-in-law fish, I think we will use it for crab bait.
We fished around the islands, I took a few snaps but couldn’t really take any good ones that summed up the majesty of it, but when you are around small islands on a sea of glass, good fun. There are turtles in both these photos, see if you can spot them – you might need the larger photos in the gallery on the right.
Fishing with a handline. I might have been a tad seasick in this photo.
After we got back the real fun began. We were hit by a perfect storm, the tide had turn 20 minutes ago. We were in the bottom of a slippery boat ramp, and it was about an hour until sundown. So what happens? Well the tires of the truck we are using to get it up are spinning, and another guy notices that one of the tyres was moving into the other. The axle of the boat trailer had snapped! In 1 hour it would be underwater and in about an hour and a half it would be dark. Fuck!
So off we all go desperately trying to fix it. We find an axle substitute pretty easily, but the problem is the load bearing bit of still, about 3 inches thick has gone. Without I the trailer collapses. Our first attempt to fix it comprised of two sheets of metal and a hammer stacked up. That exploded nearly straight away, however, we did manage to drive a metre which gave us probably another hour before we were underwater. So off we went again, using whatever we could find around us. I soon found a blanket, which I was going to use to jump a barbwire fence into the constuction yard next door – suddenly Craig emerged from an office building with a great block of wood he had found under some stairs. Using that, Charlie (aka MacGuyver) a rope, that steel pole and two jacks we manged to fix it, with about 30 minutes to spare!
With all that I didn’t get back home until around 9, long day!
