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!