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FISHING CAPTAIN ASPARAGUS DISCOVERS 'NEW' SHARK SPECIES IN WA BY CAPTAIN ASPARAGUS L ast month I did a trip back to the awesome fishing spot of Exmouth high up along the coast of WA. On the western side of the peninsula is the famous Ningaloo reef, where folks pay the big bucks to go out to swim with the whale sharks. Go on.. you must have heard of it! Me, I don't really give a rats about the Whale sharks, I am after more interesting fish than those. Exmouth has some of the world's largest giant trevally swimming around off it's scattered reefs and rocks, huge sand flats full of shallow water target species like permit and bonefish, and all around the reefs you will find big spanish mackerel, coral trout and... well hell, all sorts of string- pullers. A great spot for a fisherman! I was about to go fishing with mates Pete Montague, Noel McCall and a few mates of theirs, and for eight days we were just going to cream the fishing, no doubt about it. I had been making all sorts of plans for this trip. I'd lined up super-duper lures to use on the sand flats, I'd sussed out some great rods for the big GTs, and others for playing on the flats: man, was I ready to rock! Trouble is, no-one told Huey all this, so when I arrived by plane (the others got to drive, towing their boats 1000kms from Perth ha, ha, ha!), it was to find that someone had left a window open and there was a mean little southerly draught of around 20 knots keeping things well-ventilated. Oooh... bugger. And it wasn't just for the first day either, oh no, it was every flamin' day. It would blow 20 knots from the SE until around 3pm every day, when, what with us being lucky buggers and all, it would turn off and swing around to 20kn SW every evening at around six. That meant we had three hours of moderately calm fishing every day so we did manage to get out, but it cancelled all my best laid plans of flats fishing, poppering, and so, on due to the absolute need for the other guys to catch enough fish to fill the porta-freezers they all had brought. Fishing trips in WA are freezer- fillers, not just arty-farty sports fishing exercises you know! It is kinda hard to give an account of all the fishing we did, mostly it consisted of smuggling any fish we caught past the damn sharks. You know how we hear on the telly all the time, about how the sharks are being wiped out, how they're all endangered? Aww.. the poor wee nigh-extinct sharkies! Yeah, well that's just tosh. They are all alive, happy, and following me everywhere I travel around the world. I find them in the Solomons, I leave them behind. They follow me to Norfolk Island. And blow me down there they are again, all in Exmouth lining up waiting for something tasty to hook itself on my line. It just ain't fair. About the most fun I had on this trip was off the Tantabiddi boat ramp on the Ningaloo side of the peninsula. The wind was honking, so we anchored up inside the lagoon itself in water only just seven metres deep. The water was so stirred up there was stuff-all 52 Professional Skipper July/August 2012 One of the "effin" sharks common off Exmouth visibility. However, the sounder was reading good fish among the coral below us just off the side of a large sand bar. Noel was at the back of the boat, snagging in the coral, while I was messing about with a small Intruder Inchiku jig, catching tiddly little reef fish, mostly small emperors and the local equivalents of Jock Stewarts. After Noel got fed up losing rigs to the coral I suggested perhaps he could use one of these micro fish I was playing with as a livie. "Great idea!" he said, and in short order a small spangled emperor was on a hook and dropped down near-ish to the bottom. It didn't last long. One thing with live baits, there's no peck-peck-peck of a fish nibbling at your bait, oh no, this was re-proven and in very short order Noel's rod bent over like a soggy pretzel as something LARGE engulfed it. By this stage of the trip (half way thru), we all chorused our familiar refrain of "effin' sharks!" when the line popped free. Effin Sharks being the most common species of shark over here, but there are also: the Effin Brown Mongrel Shark, the Effin Nurse Shark, and of course the Effin Huge Shark – all well known local species. Oh! That was odd, the bait fish was still on the hook, it hadn't been scissored off! I mean, it wasn't a healthy little fish any more, oh no, it was distinctly flat and somewhat goggle-eyed, but it hadn't been actually bitten... what was this? So, back over the side it went while I hunted for a fresh replacement and before you could say boo, the same bait got inhaled again! This time though, Noel was in a no-nonsense frame of mind. He hit the fish with a heavy strike, just to set the hook, as you do, and