Tonight there is a
free BBQ dinner at the van park. Bring a plate and your grog and
they’ll feed fish to you. And
it’s true. Each of us gets a meal of fresh fish, gratis. They run a weekly
fishing competition in this park and we figure the unwanted fish goes into the
freezer for Saturday night. At the boat ramp, 7.04am , we
are met by Elizabeth
B herself who says: “You’re in trouble, you’re late.”
Despite all this intimidation we get into the Blue-nose
Salmon, which we first ate at the BBQ last night. Whack! They strike and
take off like silver bullets. Cap’n Bob has the drags on the reels screwed up
tight – he expects us to simply winch them up to the boat to be netted,
brutally overpowered. Nevertheless these fish are fighters, leaping out of the
water, running under the boat, crossing over other peoples’ lines and taking
off for the horizon. Your heart beats fast!
Unlucky people (today it is Boonie)
catch the despised catfish. Cap’n Bob
grimaces. “Don’t touch a catfish unless you want to experience pain you can’t
describe.”The slightly luckier ones ( Boonie and Harry) catch Steelhead Salmon. “Bait,” says Cap’n Bob ,
these fish look wonderfully sleek and silver. “They’re no good to eat?” we ask.“Yeah,
they’re all right,” says Cap’n Bob, checking whether a mutiny is fomenting,
“but we use ‘em for bait.”
The water is only 2 metres deep way out here and we
are fishing about 200 metres from the dredged ore-ship channel. The water is a
dusty green colour, full of nutrients flowing down the creeks and channels. It’s crowded with fish. By 11am the boat has caught about 30 Bluenose. I
caught four. The other people caught all the rest. We are not very happy.
Clearly it’s a conspiracy – they have light-coloured rods and green-filament
line ; we have black rods and blue filament. That must be it.
“And bugs,” warns Cap’n Bob. “Don’t get cut or
scratched at this time of year. The water’s full of nasty bacteria. You’ll get
blood poisoning quick as a wink.” I wonder if Bermuda ( a member of the party who early in the trip had accidents and suffered what looked like a bite on his leg ) could have been poisoned
by a land-based catfish , but my diagnosis is distracted by a striking Salmon. I
have hooked the biggest fish of the day, close to 800mm long. Everyone sees it
just at the instant it throws the hook and escapes, so they can’t deny its
existence, but as it swims away it increases in size in my imagination and
shrinks to a tiddler in everyone else’s.
The next morning we are on time. The Elizabeth B,
showing its scars, is illuminated by a light blue sky while gulls and terns
squawk and wheel overhead before diving onto baitfish. Big pelicans keep their
distance; fish are jumping everywhere. The weather is perfect. The three of us
couldn’t eat even one of the two fish we took back and filleted yesterday, it
was too big. Today we’ll keep only one fish and release any others. Cap’n Bob,
who is actually smiling today because we’re not strangers, says he’ll keep some
fish to give to the ‘Mister Sister’, the male nurse at the Karumba Health Clinic.
The Salmon seem bigger today. We catch around 20
between us, and have a lot more fun as we secretly ease off the reel drags and have a genuine fight with the fish. We quickly learn how to hook them in the
mouth so they don’t get damaged. It’s
very satisfying to let
them go. The morning
closes with a catch of about 25 salmon. I
beat Boonie’s record for the biggest catfish. NEXT : Dirty ending
for Marco Polo .
