The only specialised marine publication in Oceania that focuses on the maritime industry, from super yachts to small craft to large commercial ships, including coastal shipping, tugs, tow boats, barges, ferries, tourist, sport-fishing craft
Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/142553
fishing A bit of a contemplate on a bit of an 'expotition' BY CAPTAIN ASPARAGUS L ast issue I had a bit of a contemplate on how lucky we are here in New Zealand, as seen through the eyes of some overseas visitors I had hosted this summer. Basically, these lasses could not believe how good we have it down here in our part of the world. This is a bit of a follow up on that same line really, as I am just back from another trip to West Australia, and despite the rosy picture of instant employment and meteoric pay rates, I saw a flip side to the perceived blessings of WA, compared to our own unsung existence this side of the world. My mates and I were fishing out of Denham, up at Shark Bay, roughly a thousand kilometres north of Perth. Pete, the august leader of our expotition ("expotition" as in Winnie the Pooh and that is something like our trip, pooh-esque if you like) had fished Shark Bay in his youth, about 30 years before, but mostly from a dinghy, and had caught shed-loads of fish. This time though, with the boats we had now (Pete's boat being a flash 7.2m centre console), we had range to get out wide and hopefully hammer the fish... at least, such was our plan. We didn't disgrace ourselves, but also, we hardly covered ourselves in fish-killing glory either. It was pretty hard work actually, landing our feed. Our target was to catch our limit every day and sadly we did not achieve this once. "Whoa!" I hear you all cry, "limiting out every day! That is disgraceful! Limit your catch, don't catch your limit!" Yes, well, we shall cover that shortly. Last year on our trip to Exmouth I had admired Pete's boat, and I do like centre consoles, especially in places tropical, so I was looking forward to spending some time on the water on this sleek machine. Launching at Denham, it was a pretty long hike to anywhere decent to fish according to our reading of the charts. It was 40nm to the southern entrance to Shark Bay at the bottom end of Dirk Hartog Island and in the other direction, another 40nm to est Shoals of nor'w owfish are toxic bl of fin and flesh 50 P f Professional Ski i l Skipper J l /A July/August 2013 A highly pr ized rankin cod the top end of Dirk Hartog – Dirk Hartog Island forms the western and outside arm of Shark Bay. Trips the first couple of days took us out to the southern entrance to Shark Bay, a long haul, blessedly in moderately calm and mostly dry conditions, and for large parts of the last third of the trip, past shallow sand and scattered coral flats that just cried out for some light tackle spin fishing fun. To hear Pete pronounce these to be areas just chocka with bluebone, snapper, coral trout and, ooo, just everything! Well, hell, that just rang all my bells. However, although we did pick up a nice estuary cod on a trolled lure near these flats, we never spent any worthwhile time hunting the area as we were constantly on the lookout for filletable fish. And when we did finally try fishing these sexy looking areas, we just found schools of bloody northwest blowfish, not affectionately known locally as bolt cutters, as such is their ability to bite hooks in half. Oh, and they are deadly poisonous too. Lovely fish. Tui. We did go outside, to water up to 100m deep, with what could best be described as indifferent results, but really with a fairly steady 15kn breeze, it did make life rather uncomfortable. Apart from the distances involved here, probably the most striking thing to this humble Kiwi was the bleak barrenness of the area. If you were to be shipwrecked and finally, starving and thirsty, wash up on these coasts... Oh boy. You'd get back on your raft and paddle back out again! But I digress. Over the next few days we did explore a little. We headed out from the Monkey Mia side of the Bay and while it was calm, a flat and glassy calm, it was also seemingly flat, glassy and fishlessly calm. After that rather abortive trip, we resolved to head to the far end of Dirk Hartog Island, pretty much a straight run NNW from Denham, if the weather was half way decent, we'd go! We went. Forecast was for 15kn SW in the morning dropping to 10kn SW in the afternoon. Sweet! Pretty much sheltered waters all the way and glassing out to boot. We got to the top of Dirk Hartog, no worries. A bit bouncy as the SW was rather disconcertingly a shade more southerly www.skipper.co.nz