Sod The Crocs!
UK Total Sea fishing 2004
The far north of Australia offers some of the best sea fishing in the world. The only problem, as Jim Foster discovered, was the threat from man-eating sharks and crocodiles..
"A few words of warning,” said holiday company boss Greg Bethune as we steamed down the west coast of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula.
"You’ll be fishing in a very remote area, mostly from the 16ft dinghies we have. Don’t ever swim. If you do, there’s a chance that something will try and eat you. Don’t get out of the boat in water that’s more than ankle deep. And if you do fish from the beach, don’t wade.
"Always stay vigilant and watch the water in front of you for any signs of danger. If you stay sensible, you’ll be safe – and more importantly, you’ll catch a lot of fish.”
I was one of the first ‘whinging Poms’ ever to board Greg’s 19-metre mothership, the ‘Tropic Paradise’. I was there with my mate Gareth Downey and 10 other anglers at the beginning of what has been described by top American angling journalists as ‘the best week’s fishing on the planet’.
Greg’s warning didn’t worry me in the slightest. Crocs? Sod ‘em. Sharks? Not a problem – I didn’t intend on going for a swim! All I wanted to do was get fishing. After all, I had spent nearly 30 hours in the air to get to Cape York, the peninsula of land that stretches up above Cairns in the far north-east corner of the Australian continent. I was just desperate to get fishing.
As we steamed to the fishing grounds, the sun setting over the sea to the west, I rigged up a couple of saltwater fly rods and wondered at the impressive scale of the operation that Greg and his partner Jenny run.
The ‘Tropic Paradise’ is the most impressive fishing boat I have ever boarded. At 19 metres long and over six metres wide, it was like a hotel. I counted six twin bedrooms on board, each containing
a double bunk with proper bedding. In addition to this there were flushing toilets, showers and even a kitchen with a resident top-class chef.
On the top deck, four 16ft dinghies were stored, waiting to be launched onto the sea via a powerful crane. Behind us, three more dinghies were being towed as we made our way down to the first anchorage point.
We arrived at our destination, the mouth of the Jackson River, at midnight. The crane was put into operation and the dinghies were launched under a spotlight’s glare. Even in the pitch black we could tell the water all around us was teaming with life. Small tarpon jumped out of the water as they chased baitfish, while further from the boat the occasional bigger splash was slightly more disturbing. Deadly sea snakes also drifted by, sleeping on the surface of the water.
The first fishing day dawned bright and calm. I got out of bed and had a first good look at my surroundings. We were anchored between several sand bars. On each side of the river were thick mangrove swamps, with dense Australian bush behind. It was about as inhospitable an environment as you could imagine.
But, of course, that’s what makes the area so rich in wildlife and the sea so full of fish. Commercial fishing is virtually unheard of in the waters around the Cape York Peninsula, firstly because so few people live there and secondly because it’s well protected by Australia’s strict fisheries protection laws.
After breakfast, I walked to the back of the boat and looked into the water to see if I could see any fish. I got a major shock as a huge, 12ft shark appeared from underneath the ship, followed by remoras and two giant grouper that Greg estimated to weigh at least 300lb apiece.
Any ideas anyone might have had about swimming quickly vanished, and the importance of not falling overboard was stressed once again by Greg. "If one of those groupers bites you, it’ll rip your skin off,” he said encouragingly.
All the anglers were allocated boats. Much to the amusement of the Aussies, Gareth and I were down to fish in the dinghy named ‘Mr Pink’ (named after a character in the Tarantino film, Reservoir Dogs). We got in, started the engine, loaded the dinghy with our gear and got underway.
All the dinghies left the mothership at the same time. There were guides in three of the boats, and it was up to them to look after us via the walkie talkies that we were all given.
To be honest I was amazed at the freedom we had. Although there were guides within a mile or two of our dinghy at all times, I couldn’t ever imagine a similar set-up operating in the UK – the political ‘do-gooders’ in the government’s Health and Safety department would go bonkers! After all, I was in charge of a 16ft boat in waters I didn’t know in the slightest.
I took control of the engine and powered the dinghy out through a maze of sandbars into the open ocean. The buzz and sense of freedom I got as the boat left the river mouth was just one of the best feelings I have ever had in fishing. It felt truly liberating to be in control of such a boat in an environment like that, a place few people had ever seen, let alone fished.
Gareth and I decided that tuna on the fly gear would be our first target. Schools and schools of pelagic fish migrate up and down the Cape York Peninsula, and it was the long-tailed tuna we were after. Running to well over 30lb, we knew we’d have a scrap on our hands if we hooked one!
Finding the tuna wasn’t a problem. Throughout the first morning, fish were ‘busting up’ all over the place, herding bait balls at the surface and attacking them with such gusto that feeding tuna would, at times, be leaping up to 10 feet in the air.
Catching one on the fly wasn’t to be so easy, though. The shoals were moving fast, and it was hard to position the boat in front of the fish so either Gareth or myself could have a cast at them. If the boat didn’t spook the shoal, then we usually only had a couple of casts at the tuna before they moved off.
However, once we’d mastered the techniques involved, those two casts were usually enough to catch. On a couple of occasions, we could see the tuna darting through the waves coming towards us; moving very, very fast. More than once we spotted the individual tuna we wanted to catch, cast to it and watched it take the fly.
When hooked, it was a case of ‘hold on’. We had some of the best fly gear available, and it was needed. The drags on our reels were tested to the extreme as the tuna powered off on 200-metre runs at lightening speed. When, eventually, we got the fish back to the boat, it would dive – and the fight would turn into a battle of strength as we tried to haul each tuna up from the depths to the waiting net.
But the tuna weren’t nearly as spectacular as the queenfish. The best sport we experienced with the queens was on the penultimate day of the trip. We had beached our boat and were wading along some sandbars when we saw the water half a mile out erupting. The cause of this was a school of queenfish half a mile across that were indulging in the most savage feeding frenzy you could ever imagine.
We hopped back in the boat and powered out to the feeding zone. The sight before us, when we got there, was just indescribable. For hundreds of square yards all around us, big queenfish (most being over 20lb) were attacking an enormous bait ball. The sea was being whipped into a foam!
Luckily, the fish were feeding so hard they were oblivious to the boat and, like the tuna before, we could pick out individual specimens and cast to them with the fly, watching every fish casually suck the fly in as it swam past. Once hooked, the queenfish would leap high into the air, time after time, before stripping 100 metres of line from our reels in one run.
Although we returned most of the fish we caught over the course of the week, the residents on board ‘Tropic Paradise’ still needed to eat; so any deep-hooked tuna, queenfish or spanish mackerel were kept for the pot.
We dined well all week. No, I’ll correct that – we dined superbly, like kings! Fresh crabs were collected from the pots, along with fish dishes that would make the UK’s most prestigious seafood eateries green with envy. Very few people will ever have eaten fish as fresh as the fish we ate.
As well as fishing for pelagic species, like the tuna and queenfish, we also ran the risk of crocodiles by beaching our boats and fishing from the many shore in the river mouths. Our aim here was to sight fish for trevally and permit.
Sight fishing with the fly is probably the most exciting form of angling I have ever done. Our best day’s fishing of the entire trip occurred when it was our turn to go out with one of the guides, a nice Aussie lad who Greg referred to as ‘Big Gay Phil’. Phil took us to a spot where he was convinced we’d find shoals of golden trevally and permit to cast to.
He wasn’t wrong! All through the day we had shots at shoals of trevally, casting our flies in front of the fish and watching their reaction as we stripped the lures back to the boat. The trevally would swim around the flats in tight-knit shoals of a dozen fish or so, and on many occasions Gareth and I both hooked fish from the same shoal at the same time.
The takes the fish gave were very different to the takes from the tuna and queenfish. The trevally would compete for the fly, with the ‘winning’ fish rising from the shoal to suck the fly into its mouth just below the surface of the water. As with all the other fish we caught in the week, the subsequent fight was most enjoyable on 9-wt fly gear.
One area where we went wrong to start with was when it came to striking the fish. Because we were using flies on large, 2/0 hooks, a 9-wt rod was not capable of sinking the hook using a conventional strike. Instead it was a case of, when the fish took the fly, continuing the retrieve and pulling the fly home with your hand, with the rod pointing towards the fish. Only when the fish started to power off did you lift the rod into it.
If I could identify one highlight in the week, it would be catching my first permit on the fly. The permit is one of the most sought-after fish species in the world for fly anglers, and there are plenty of them in and around the river mouths of Cape York. Hooking them, though, can prove difficult. Not only are permit very spooky, but they seem very clever, too! As a measure of this, Big Phil the guide (who was no mug with a fly rod) caught his first on our trip – his first in years of trying.
I was lucky enough to fool one, too. That day remains etched on my mind. It started when Phil took us to a favourite spot of his in the entrance of the Doughboy River, a top area for permit. We beached the dinghy, looking out for crocs all the time (an 18-footer had been seen on a nearby sandbar just the day before) and started to wade the shallows. For safety reasons we never waded in water more than ankle deep, looking out for permit, sharks and crocodiles all the time.
As I reached the end of the sandbar we were on, I saw them – a shoal of permit, ranging in size from around 12lb to 20lb, coming towards me. I cast my crab imitation fly to them and let it sink the three feet or so to the seabed. The shoal kept coming and, when they were about five feet from the fly, I started the retrieve – making the crab kick up puffs of sand behind it.
As one, all the permit in the shoal raced up to the fly to have a look at it. I could see their eyes swivelling in their sockets as they watched the fly skip along the seabed, but would they take? With my heart in my mouth, I was convinced a permit was about to snaffle the fly when, from nowhere, a 12lb trevally barged in and nabbed it instead!
Later in the day, I spotted a shoal of trevally moving through a gap between two sandbars. On closer inspection, I saw a permit or two among them, so I made a cast. Bang! This time there was no hesitation. A fish took the fly straight away, powering off into open water… but I couldn’t see for sure whether it was a permit or a trevally, though I had my suspicions.
Forty-five minutes later the fish was still somewhere in open water. I knew it was a permit by then, because Phil had seen it – and no golden trevally fights that long! The only slight problem was crocodiles. We’d had to follow the fish along the sandbar, and I found myself battling it out right over a drop-off into deep water, where I couldn’t see the seabed. This is a big no-no in Australia’s far north. Crocs hide in deep water on the edge of sandbars, where they ambush their prey. So it was with shaking legs that eventually Gareth netted the permit for me!
Crocs? Sod ‘em, I had caught my first permit on the fly. And to me, that one fish was enough to make the whole trip worthwhile. All those hours spent in the air and at airports, all the risk from crocs and sharks: it had all been worth it.
I returned to ‘Pommie’ land a happy man. Usually when I go on holiday somewhere, I don’t go back as I want to see as much of the world as I can. But Greg’s trip is something different. It is truly special, and I will definitely return for what can almost certainly be described as the week’s best fishing on the planet.
FACT FILE
Name of trip: Carpentaria Seafaris
Location: Bamaga, Cape York, Australia
Contact. CARPENTARIA SEAFARISinfo@seafaris.com.au CHECK THEIR COMPREHENSIVE SITE especially the trip reports section where you will see gregs report and photographs on this trip also. Website:www.seafaris.com.au
