Desert Fishing Lessons
Desert Fishing Lessons – I’m a water person, a river person, a fish person. I spend an inordinate amount of my time grubbing around in the bottom of muddy waterholes and rivers, thinking about the why and how of fish that live in particular areas. It wasn’t planned, it just happened.
I’ve always been fascinated by how living things get by on the planet, but this interest has manifested itself in the mysterious world of things living underwater. And this fascination has narrowed further over the years, and now focuses on fishy things within the driest bits of the driest inhabited planet on Earth. Fish and deserts are unusual bedfellows, but that’s the
way it is.
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I was born into the east coast middle-class culture that valued hard work and success. Happily, this east coast culture also included the coast itself, which was wild and free, and allowed us youngsters to explore it and, in my case at least, begin a long and fishy journey that continues to lure me to remote parts of Australia.
No matter where I go, I still find myself peering into the water and wondering what might be going on.
I remember on Boxing Day 1985, schoolmates Marty, Alan and I drove up to Bateau Bay on the New South Wales central coast. We unloaded the car, pulled on backpacks, picked up bundles of fishing rods and then traipsed around to the rocks at the southern side of the smaller beach.
Dropping our packs and tins of spaghetti, we scuttled out to the only platform high enough to fish from. As we reached the spot, the rain set in so we beat an expletive-filled retreat back to the small clearing where we had made camp throughout the year, something that driver’s licenses and borrowed station wagons had made possible.
Improvements in both our fishing tackle and techniques for landing gamefish from the rocks meant our targets gradually became bigger, faster, and stronger. Back then we ate, slept, and breathed fishing.
We sat in the rain and became miserable. We never took tents, preferring to put a sleeping bag out in the sand. We figured that if it was too wet to sleep, it was probably too wet to fish as well, so we’d just go home. On this occasion though, we’d only just arrived and so we waited a little longer.
Soon the rain disappeared, leaving a humid east-coast afternoon, a washed and scrubbed rock platform, and a rainbow hovering over the rolling Pacific Ocean.
We headed back out to the little ledge and – luckily – landed a small pike on the second cast using a small metal lure. (A pike is an elongated, missile-shaped fish with a fearsome set of teeth that prowls around the coast looking for smaller prey – they resemble a mini-barracuda.)
There was only about an hour of light left so I quickly rigged up a live-baiting outfit. Using the jargon, we loved so much at the time, we were going to ‘float out a Livie on a cut-down Snyder MT9120 with a roller tip and a Sealine 50H with 400 meters
of 10 kilos’.
What it meant in English was that we were using a strong rod with a roller tip to minimize line friction, and a suitable reel spooled with a 10-kilogram breaking strain line. The pike was a mean-looking beast about 40 centimeters long. Anything that was going to eat was going to be substantially larger.
Live-baiting is exactly as it sounds, so it’s important to get the ‘bait’ back in the water as quickly as possible. I threaded the line through the ten guides, tied on a swivel, then two meters of 60-kilogram trace, a polystyrene bobby cork and an appropriate hook. I pushed the hook just behind the pike’s head but above its lateral line, and then lowered it into the swell lapping at the rocks.
If you’re lucky, the fish will swim away from the rocks, and the current will assist in drifting the impaled fish into deeper water. If you’re not, the bait ends up banging against the rocks and the line snags on whatever’s handy. That afternoon everything went according to plan, and the water was so clear we could see the pike dragging the float out to sea.
Slowly, I peeled line from the reel, making sure not to let too much out and risk the line catching on a submerged rock while allowing the disabled fish to go wherever it tried.
Within a couple of minutes, the pike was at least 50 meters away and showed no sign of stopping – if anything, it seemed to be speeding up.
The line kept being taken from the spool; not rapidly, but fast enough for me to tell Alan and Marty that something was going on. By the time they both stopped what they were doing to have a look, it was obvious that our pike had transformed into something bigger. As the line sped up, the most difficult part of the exercise – setting the hook – had to be attempted.
This is when most people lose their fish, because the hook is often incorrectly positioned to become embedded in a fishy mouth. I lowered the rod tip and tightened the drag mechanism of the reel. I clamped my thumb over the spool and, as the line tightened, raised the rod in a slow but constant arc.
It felt like I’d just hooked a huge piece of wet carpet, but I was pleasantly surprised when – again – the line began peeling from the reel more quickly than before. I repeated the setting procedure at least twice more to remind myself what to do next, and then methodically began to fight the biggest fish I’ve ever hooked.
We suspected from the start that our hungry visitor was a yellowtail kingfish. Kingfish are built like a torpedo, and this one struggled in wide arcs and more than once dived for the rocky bomboras that dotted the ocean floor.
In the end, it took an hour and fifteen minutes to bring it in, by which time a small crowd had gathered. Alan edged down the broken rocky shoreline, and with one swift and risky maneuver gaffed the fish. It left the ocean in a brilliant shimmer of iridescent purple, green and yellow, only fading to ghostly silver a few minutes later as it lay in a nearby rock pool.
We spent that night eating the fish and reliving the fight and looked forward to the morning in the hope there’d be a similarly co-operative pike and similarly large gamefish waiting to eat them. A kingfish over a meter long is a great catch anywhere, but it’s especially memorable when landed from a small rock platform in fading light by a small group of enthusiastic teenagers.
Back then I loved the technical aspects of fishing, but more than that I loved the freedom of the rocks and the ocean, the fact that once you were there you didn’t need to look at a watch, and the feeling that anything could happen. Everyone who fishes know this ‘I wonder what’ll happen today?’ feeling. For people like me who have never stopped fishing, although the equipment and technical aspects have changed, the feeling remains the same.
Twenty-five years after landing the kingfish at Bateau Bay, Max Tischler and I are sitting in the cab of a Landcruiser and heading to the most unusual fishing location you could find in Australia – the desert.
We’re a reasonably odd couple, doing reasonably odd things. Max is into birds, reptiles and mammals, is younger than me and still has hair – quite a lot of it – which he keeps in long dreadlocks that make him irresistible to a substantial percentage of the female population. In contrast, friends tell me I resemble a bikie or a criminal, my hair fell out a few years back and, unlike Max, I count fish not cute little marsupials.
The fish of the temporary rivers of the Simpson Desert don’t grow as big as the pike-eating kingfish of Bateau Bay, but they’re definitely as tough, and they’re here-today-gone-tomorrow lifestyle has fascinated me for several years. For both Max and me, the ‘what’s going to happen today?’ thing is the biggest constant in all the remote fieldwork we do.
Each morning, we crawl out of our swags, warm up next to a little gadget fire, have a cuppa, have a laugh, and then go and empty traps and nets with at least a smidgin of the same enthusiasm I had back in 1985.
There has been a massive flood in central Australia and 2010–11 is looking like 1974 as a weather period to remember. On both occasions Brisbane floods and cyclones wreak havoc across northern Australia.
And on both occasions central Australia – the driest part of the driest inhabited continent – receives massive rainfall and the normally-dry rivers run like runaway trains.
Max and I are lucky, because we’ve been scurrying around the desert for a while, and we’ve experienced dry years, proper drought years and wet years. Now we’re taking samples following the biggest flood either of us will probably ever see.
Read Much More Inside this Absolutely True-Life Adventure….
Part I Down by the Riverside
2 Big Nasty: The Carp Story
3 The alien invasion
4 Hanging in There: Native Fish in the Murray–Darling
Part II Way Out West
6 Little Fish, Big Dunefield : The Mulligan River in the Simpson Desert
7 Grass Castles and Water Wars: The Rivers of the Cooper Catchment
8 Kidman Country: The Georgina and Diamantina Catchments
9 Stuck in the Middle: the Bulloo Catchment
10 Things That Aren’t Fish
Part III Recovery Road
11 Obstacles and Cautionary Tales
12 Lessons from the Big Sky Country
13 Four Rivers
Without people and places there are no stories, so thanks – firstly – to the people of western Queensland and the Lake Cargelligo district in New South Wales.
I started off playing music and taking pictures and then drifted into teaching before finally drifting into science, so I certainly wasn’t born to it. The learning curve has been brutally steep at times, so thanks to all the colleagues and fish freaks for their assistance and patience, and special thanks to Robyn Watts, Angela Arthington, Stuart Bunn and Harry Balcombe.
Without a leg-up from my old friend James Woodford this
project wouldn’t have turned into a book, without the expertise
of editor Melanie Ostell it would have been a very crappy book,
and without UWAP it wouldn’t exist. So, thanks to everyone.
250 Pages of An Absolutely Awesome Story – A Must Read for All Ages…
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Regards, Coyalita
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