Boating Newbies

With supposedly great weather predicted on Sunday, we decided to get Will's boat out on the water for a much overdue fishing expedition.

Whilst we're fairly comfortable these days when it comes to beach fishing, we are complete newbies in the boat. The plan was to get out in the morning and load up on squid, then catch some snapper on the arvo tide. Of course, we don't have a GPS or even GPS spots, but with some stories of mates of mates getting into a few close off shore from Wirrina, we launched the boat there about 10 am feeling rather hopeful.

We spent many hours drifting around for barely a touch (and in my case, not a touch). Kym and Will had a few cuttlefish between them, but chucked them back. Kym got a couple of perfect small bait sized squid.

We then headed out deeper and sounded around looking for some structure on the bottom which would be a likely snapper producing spot. This is a lot harder than it seems.. we'd see something good and then loop around to try settle on the spot and fail to find it again!

We eventually dropped anchor and commenced the waiting game.

Without any hint of life below deck, the weather report failed us with some very gusty winds chopping up the sea. It was getting quite uncomfortable, so we headed in shallow again to get onto smoother water.

After stopping at various spots, we finally hit upon some action as the sun was getting low in the sky. Kym winding in a big King George at 43 cm. That got the hopes up! A few big sweep were landed and released, and many rock cod too. Then Will got a good hook up that he thought might be a salmon. Instead, a monster KGW at 47cm come into the boat. Unfortunately, it went a bit quiet on the whiting after that and I was copping a well deserved ribbing about my lack of fishing ability.

With the sun getting quite low and the boat without any lighting, it was time to head in. Almost defeated, I changed back to a bigger rig declaring I would go out with a bang. On that last cast, I finally got a good bite.. excitement was huge... a whiting of my very own approached the boat, and I launched it out of the water and onto the deck. The others immediately pointed out it was smaller than theirs to belittle my moment in the spotlight, but I didn't care, I was finally on the board with something I could keep!

The last cast catch made us have another "last cast" and Will came up with a fish again, this time a really cool looking leather jacket, its blue sides shimmering in the sunlight. Being quite large, it went straight into the icebox.

So after about 9 hours on the water, we had 3 whiting, a couple of squid, and a leather jacket. Not exactly a great haul, but a few lessons learnt and it beats sitting on the couch.