Monday, December 3, 2018

Austral Winter, Part One

If things keep going as planned, my fishing trips this winter are going to have a decidedly Austral flavor.  I'm still going to do my very Boreal Baja trip for the solstice and new year (see previous entry for an example).  However, with a long week of Australian fishing under my belt already, and a couple weeks of Patagonia planned for February, there should be a lot of fishing going on down on the bottom half of the planet!

The November Down Under trip almost didn't happen, thanks to my distaste for being cooped up with other people in an airplane.  If it were just me and the stewardesses hanging out in the white noise of the cabin, it would probably be my favorite hobby ever. Instead, in reality, it is hours of bad air and baby screams and uncomfortable sleep.  But sometimes you just gotta suck it up and go, especially when your Uncle Larry is paying for a business class ticket, and so I did.

Ah, but not without sticking in a nice spell of my own flying (economy class) from Melbourne to exotic Mackay!  Why Mackay?  One reason: the Whitsunday islands.  Excellent advice from an Australian kayak fishing forum got me pointed that direction in search of sweet beach camping and unusual grabs among the reefs.  My expectations were fairly high, and all were met.  Look at my first camp at Crayfish beach:


That's a pretty sweet beach camp, and it was all mine for two nights.  And there were indeed grabs!  Initially I wasn't very optimistic, after hearing the ferry operator talk about things.  "Oh yeah, my cousin does the caretaking at the old Hook Island Resort (my takeout/return point) and he hasn't been catching anything.  He likes to watch boats come out, fish a spot, get nothing, and then motor away so that another boat can come and do the same in the same spot.  Not much fishing right now.  But for me, I'd rather watch grass grow."

That doesn't sound great; but therein lies a bit of a tale that I'll end this blog with.  Meanwhile, I'll say that there was plenty of fishing at Crayfish beach.  Without even getting in the boat, I could wade out onto the reef at low tide and cast a Crazy Charlie out over pools between 1-3 feet deep, and hook something almost every time: little yellow striped fish, little grouper-ish fish with spots, and sometimes some hard-pulling medium sized blue/purple characters that I'd never seen before but look vaguely like a triggerfish.  Pargo-ish characters put some pretty savage grabs on trolled lures that made me think they were at least twice as fat as they ended up being:



Better yet, there was a mangrove-lined back bay that was full of eager snapper that took both clousers and topwater -- and who were very tasty served up with a spicy rub and some noodles.


I missed the big one though. On day two there, something big grabbed my popper fly as soon as it landed and took off FAST for the reef. I couldn't stop it, and got snapped off; a trevally? It had a silver back and might have been two feet long. I was howling about that snapoff for sure.  In what my old buddy Strouster might consider "luck," I wasn't quite done snapping off big fish, either.  Days later, after I'd gone back to the mainland and asked some questions about barramundi at a tackle shop, I ended up at Proserpine Lake. After much trolling and "flipping" (weighted plastic fish trap-like lures), a light turned on and I got two solid hookups within a 20 minute window. One was huge, like a meter-long tarpon, and immediately flung the lure back in my direction after one awesome jump. With hands shaking I kept at it and hooked a second, catchable-sized one and finally yanked him close to the boat after some spectacular aerials -- or, I should say nearly catchable, as the line snapped under light pressure just as I was getting out the camera. The fish might have been pushing two feet long, and I think it might have gill-raked my 40# flouro tippet (on 40# braid). I went out the next day using longer pieces of 60, and didn't get a single bump in 4.5 hours of trying, much of the time with my gopro camera running just to get a shot of the jumps. Damn! I really wanted a pic of one of those beasts.


But wait!  I still haven't finished my Whitsunday island observations.  First: it was not kid-glove kayaking.  The massive tidal movements in that part of the world, paired with opposing winds, made it a much-needed exercise in advanced kayaking for me.  Almost immediately upon trolling out of Crayfish Bay going south, I got into a state of full clapotis, with the current rushing south at pace, the considerable southerly wind pushing it into steep waves, and plenty of reflecting waves off the rocky headland to make it crazy and unpredictable.  I knew I shouldn't have been trolling, but didn't dare take both hands off the paddle to deal with it!  Eventually, I was forced to reel up in order to cross a big "potato patch" of standing waves on a rip between the north tip of Whitsunday and one of the points on Hook island, where I had to do a couple of no-fooling low braces to keep from getting capsized.  As I looked back with my lungs pumping and hands shaking, I saw that this little feat had earned a round of applause and whistles from a passing sailboat.

And this is all good; who knows when conditions like that are going to happen in Baja?  I've been dorking around on calm days on the San Luis Forebay and the delta too long, and doing my fastidiously pre-checked Monterey Bay trips, thoroughly vetted for swell and tide and wind.  I'm getting old, but I don't need to get lazy!  Thank you Whitsundays for a wake-up call.

The second observation is that, despite the gloomy prognostications I heard on the ferry, the fishing was nice!  At my Cairn beach camp I had regular grabs from reef fish while trolling about, and also was able to hook nice coral trout on flies cast right from the beach.  And those puppies are TASTY.  Probably the nicest coral of the trip came to hand just in front of the Hook Island Resort, where I was killing time waiting for the ferry, and (unbeknownst) being watched on binoculars from the resort's windows.  Finally the caretaker, a really friendly guy (I didn't run across a single unfriendly Australian) came strolling down the beach to talk.  This was the cousin who wasn't catching anything, and so he seemed pretty surprised that a California geek in a kayak was doing pretty darned OK right on his front porch.



I shit you not, that nice fellow actually helped carry my gear over the beach to the ferry, and asked me for a selfie shot before we left.  I was feeling pretty good about the world.  Though, later that night I kind of wished I'd kept the coral trout pictured above to fry and enjoy and prolong the Whitsunday joy just that much longer.  I'm cultivating my Sydney office contacts and seriously thinking about hauling the kayak back there to general area of the Great Barrier Reef, which is as far as my venerable old Feathercraft Kahuna has every gone from home.

But as always, as far as "home" goes, it's where your hat hangs just right.  I got into the groove camping on the beach and loved every second of my warm, humid, unscheduled life.  Which is, of course, how vacationing should be. I was pleasantly drunk on fresh warm air and maybe just a little Bruichladdich CC01 or Laphroig PX Cask from duty free when I mistook a turtle fin for a shark fin and went out to cast the popper for a shark take.  But it's all good, right?




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