THE PRIZE
TRIP OF A LIFETIME Modern fishing May 2005
By Steve Starling & Greg Bethune
Starlo visits the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef due east of the tip of Cape York with Modern Fishing competition prize-winner, Michael Edmonds, and experiences some truly extraordinary tropical action.
"How’s the serenity? Better than Bonnie Doon, and the fishing was definitely better!" Thus began my mate Greg Bethune’s website report after our week-long trip to the outer Barrier Reef last December. Greg’s a fan of "The Castle’s" wry, Aussie humour, and his serenity quote from that film was spot-on.
Just like "The Castle", Bethune’s droll, incisive and frequently amusing trip reports (posted regularly on www.seafaris.com) have become classics in their own right over recent years, attracting thousands of hits every month from those who’ve been there, are planning to go, like to dream about it, or are simply interested in what’s happening at the pointy end of Australia.
It’s no secret I’m a regular visitor to this location, and a once or twice a year passenger on Greg and Jennie’s mother-ship "Tropic Paradise". In the past, all these trips have been down the west coast of the Cape; fishing those superlative rivers, estuaries, flats, beaches and shallow reefs from the Jardine to the Wenlock. But in recent times, Greg has added a couple of long-range reef excursions to each season’s calendar. Last December, I was fortunate enough to sample one of these as my reward for winning the writers’ competition run by this magazine to celebrate its 35th birthday, and I was accompanied by Townsville-based angler, Michael Edmonds, who’d won the readers’ competition staged over the same period. We joined 10 other paying clients aboard "Tropic Paradise" for a week none of us will forget.
Rather than give a typical blow-by-blow account of our trip, I’ve decided to let the photos we snapped tell the story, interspersed with a few extracts from the report that Greg and I knocked out on his trusty lap-top during the week. In many ways, these vignettes capture the essence of an amazing voyage better than any dry catalogue of what was caught and lost. Let’s start with Greg’s introduction:
CAPTAIN’S LOG
GB: Plenty of excitement amongst our crew during the lead up to the first of the late 2004 Reef trips. Extensive planning with regard to the predicted tides and current streams went into the scheduling of these trips, because the weather is so important when you’re 80 to 100 nautical miles off the coast. The forecast was brilliant as we left on Wednesday; east to north east winds, 5 to 10 knots, rising to 10 to 15. This changed within six hours to 13 to 18 knots, rising to 20 to 25 by Sunday... Bugger!
Normally, we steam overnight for a start on ‘the outer’ next morning, but an increasing sea took it’s toll on the fleet of towed boats, breaking one towing bridle. If it wasn’t for my observant crew we’d have been down one Longboat and 70 Yammy. Spinning around we soon found the errant boat and, hitching her back up, turned with the conditions and ran for the cover of Dugong Island.
Next morning dawned bright and calm and with everyone ‘keen as’ to wet a line, we fished the shoals for a couple of hours before heading out again on the last 50 mile leg to our destination. The weather was fine and no sign of that south easter. The met’ bureau kept talking of it for a couple of days, then started downgrading their forecast to what we actually experienced for the week: Absolutely magic weather!
AS GOOD AS IT GETS
GB: First morning on the outer was spent trolling the weather edge of the reef where all manner of monsters were only too keen to eat anything in the water. Deeper diving lures were the best producers. When our anglers got too sore and disheartened from getting their butts kicked by big fish, we’d go up onto the reef and cast poppers into gutters and channels, catching (and losing) monster coral trout, GTs, red bass, long-nosed emperor and all manner of other critters.
Day one was summed up by Starlo when he said; "I don’t think you could ever get a day much better than that." A 37 kg dogtooth tuna was the best of four landed, but we lost at least another six, dropped several dolphin fish, including one monster ‘bull’, caught Spanish Mackerel out the gazoo and coral trout like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t unusual to hook one fish trolling and have another six or a dozen come up with it to nail other lures in plain view in the flat-calm, crystal clear water.
AND SO IT WENT...
GB: That was day one… I wrote what you’ve read up til now on the second evening out. Now we are steaming back, and it’s still flat, motherless calm. You could put a billiard ball on the dash and it wouldn’t roll off. I’ve got to do the report from back to front, as my memory works best on the freshest of cerebral images. Steve is going add some thoughts a bit further on.
Last night we anchored the mother-ship in the middle of nowhere in 30 m of water and caught a bunch of red emperor to take home. We marked this ground on the way to the reef, figuring it looked like good ‘red bottom’ and, literally having had enough of the action on the outer, we decided to try something different. So, day second-last we steamed westward during and after lunch, while Team Seafaris had a welcome nap out of the heat.
The wondrous GPS technology took us back to the slight rises in the bottom; 30 odd up to 27 m with a little hardening of the second echo and a fuzzy reading above the ‘white line’. I thought later, while having a drop myself and feeling the bottom (as you can with 50 pound gel-spun) that this ‘fuzz’ was what we called ‘wire weed’ during my trawling days; one of the many scourges of the prawn trawler and prime red emperor habitat. The skiffs fished within a 5 km radius of the mother-ship without anchoring; it was so calm you’d mark a bit of life on the sounder, spin around, stop and drop a No. 3 ball sinker, 6/0 hook and a Seisia wharf sardine straight onto it.
This morning, in four such consecutive drops, Starlo caught four fine specimens in the top 20 per cent of their size range; a spangled emperor, a Chinaman (recently struck off the noxious list, then added to the no-take category), a red emperor and a gold-spot trevally. While he was doing this I filleted last night’s catch of emperor and hung the frames over the transom to act as berley. Ol’ mate Starlo then rigged a 50 cm frozen queenfish we had for a marlin bait under a float and drifted it out. We watched a lone frigate bird amble through the air in the direction of his offering, and both commented that it must be on a big fish; hanging high and going nowhere in particular. I’ll let Starlo tell what happened next:
TIGER, TIGER!
SS: The block of styrofoam I was using as a float bobbed, surged and split in two, freeing my line. "I’m away," I commented, to no-one in particular. Giving the unseen critter a few seconds to chew the bait, I dropped the Trinidad into gear and struck. Solid weight, but nothing spectacular. Felt like whatever it was out there had decided to swim to us of its own accord. I kept cranking, expecting fireworks to ignite at any tick, but no — just steady, throbbing pressure as I recovered metre after metre of gel spun. Too soon we had ‘colour’, but this was no ordinary flash of chrome or red. Instead, it looked like a small reef was approaching the transom. Trouble was, this reef had a huge, box-like head, mottled stripes and a dorsal fin of Hollywood special effects dimensions. "TIGER SHARK!" I shouted... along with a few other expletives best left to the imagination.
The big tiger — every bit of 12-plus old-fashioned feet and probably 300 kg or more — didn’t even know it was hooked. It swum straight to the transom, rolled on its side to eyeball us and casually inhaled the eight red emperor frames Greg had hung over the side on a rope. Glump, tug, swallow, snap.. gone! Awesome. As the big bitey swum in lazy circles under us looking for dessert, I applied more and more pressure until I finally annoyed it enough to give a head-shake and part my 100 pound leader above the short wire trace. I simply hung the rod back in the rack after that and cracked the day’s first ice-cold beer. It was a fitting end to a trip that definitely makes my list of the best 10 ever... anywhere... anytime.
COMING HOME
SS: As I write this final entry in the trip log, we are steaming due west at a little over eight knots, chasing a sinking sun towards Mount Adolphus Island, off the tip of Cape York Peninsula. Astern, our wake is a ruler-straight band of slick water bisecting the barely rippled blanket of blue. Off either beam, small schools of jumping tuna and their attendant flocks of wheeling terns punctuate the broad, empty expanses between coral outcrops and the tiny, white handkerchiefs of distant sand cays, all shimmering together in the late afternoon heat haze. This is the Coral Sea at her most benign, and it would be hard to imagine a better place on earth to be right now... especially in light of the week we’ve just left behind us; out there on the edge of the world.
The weather is always an important supporting actor in any drama involving oceans and fish, and this past week she played the kindest of all the roles in her expansive repertoire. Daytime breezes rarely exceeded 10 knots, while at night the sou’ easter occasionally topped 15 clicks, providing just enough relief from the December heat to make drinking a beer or three on the aft deck a very pleasant experience. In short, the weather scored a perfect 10... Something that only seems to happen on other people’s trips in my long experience!
As for the fishing, it was everything I expected and then some. On Greg’s advice, I’d come loaded for bear. In hindsight, I’d have done better by equipping myself for elephant… or woolly mammoth.. or maybe brontosaurus! Out there, fish come in just three sizes; XOS, XXOS and downright scary. They all live about 10 cm away from razor sharp coral fangs on one side and even sharper shark teeth on the other. In short, the "Oh, sh*t!" factor is right off the Richter Scale, and the one thing you can bet money on is that your lure bag will be a whole lot lighter flying home than it was on the outward journey.
It’s hard to nominate high points after a week as good as this, but for me, the poppering was a stand-out. I love any kind of visual fishing, and hurling surface bloopers with faces the size of grapefruit over coral ledges where even the bait fish have muscles in their poo is right up there in my book. Having a V-formation of 4 and 5 kg red bass shouldering each other aside in an effort to sink their canines into your gurgling popper is one thing, but when a coral trout twice that size blasts up through the middle of the rugby pack and beats them all to it, you’d better hope you used pliers to ‘set’ your drag that morning. Give them an inch and it’ll be re-rig time again... nothing surer.
In particular, a couple of 15kg-plus GTs I managed to stop on spin tackle while poppering the baddest of bad country will burn in my memory for a long time; as much for the good fortune and sheer ‘arse’ involved in their capture as for the fact that all my knots held and my tackle worked. At this extreme end of the fishing spectrum — where the envelope is not just stretched, but torn wide open — the difference between success and failure is measured in centimetres and fractions of a second. It’s a blast when it all comes together, and devastating when it doesn’t.
As I said earlier, this trip definitely rates in my all-time top 10, and that’s a list culled from three decades that have taken me from the Arctic salmon rivers of Russia’s Kola Peninsula to the bonefish flats of Christmas Island and the ochre gorges of the Kimberley, plus a lot of other dream destinations in between. I’ll definitely be back for another shot at this one... with more poppers, more jigs, more spare line and the biggest set of pliers I can get hold of for setting those drags!
NEW RULES ON THE REEF
The face of recreational fishing on our Great Barrier Reef has changed considerably over time, most recently with the dramatic expansion of no-fishing and even total no-go zones within the vast Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. These days, as much as a quarter of all reef waters are off limits to anglers. This has obviously had a huge impact on charter operators and other fishing-related businesses right along the Queensland coast. Those who have survived the initial hardship involved in having so much water denied to them are now coming to terms with what’s left and learning to live with the restrictions, at least until the next round of closures.
People visiting these waters aboard private vessels need to be especially careful not to breach rules and regulations, which seem to change on a regular basis nowadays. Be sure to obtain the latest information on zoning, closures and recreational fishing regulations by contacting the great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) or Department of Primary Industry (DPI) before you go. Take careful note of what you can and can’t keep, too. For example, red bass, Chinaman fish and paddletails (all once considered high risk ciguatera toxin carriers) have now been declared safe to eat — but then added to the ‘no-take’ list, along with vulnerable species such as Maori wrasse and barramundi cod. Ignorance is no defence in the eyes of the law, so do yourself a favour and take the time to find out, or go with an accredited charter operator and do as they say.
Braided gel-spun in the 25 to 40 kg range is the best main line for this style of fishing.Take plenty of lures, leader material, wire, spare hooks and rings and spare main line.Two outfits cover most options; a heavy spin rig for poppering, and a game/troll/jig outfit based on an overhead reel for everything else.As the sun gets higher in the sky, troll deep divers or use paravanes and downriggers.
Visit www.seafaris.com to find out more about doing a ‘dream trip’ like this one!
