Sandhills to Shark Spit Wednesday 31 January 2007
Way back in my youth, I drove a taxi for three years. A most enjoyable job albeit you had to work big hours to make a decent wage.
It had its challenges though. I was assaulted a couple of times - One drunk in the back seat set fire to my hair late one night and on another occasion another drunk bashed me over the head with his arm which was in a plaster cast. I got a nasty old lump on the head out of the latter and a big fright out of the former.
I even had a lady in labour all the way from Wynnum to the RBWH at 1 am on a Christmas morning in company with her panicking mother - I shuddered when, halfway across the Story Bridge, she said, “Oh driver, its coming, its coming! “ That frightened the living daylights out of me and taught me just how fast ex-police-cars-turned-into-taxis can go when one ignores stop lights, speed limits and stop signs.
Just as I prefer fishing at night, I always preferred driving the taxi at night - longer jobs, bigger fares, sometimes a few tips, negligible traffic, cooler driving conditions . The clientele was often more colorful than daytime customers as well - there were lots of funny experiences with fares looking for, or coming from, massage parlours (as they used to be quaintly known), especially when a Japanese ship was in town and they had to communicate to me what they were looking for without their being able to speak English nor I, Japanese.
Lots of people have said to me that they would be too fearful of working a taxi at night but notwithstanding the assaults mentioned above, I never was afraid of doing the job at night.
My biggest fear was that of getting lost - in daytime just as easily as night.
It is quite silly that people expect that taxi drivers will know their way around a city so well that they will know every little cul-de-sac and gully. In fact many people get really upset and dreadfully impatient when you have to ask either for directions or for a moment (with the meter off) to look up a street directory. That situation is pretty unreasonable really - not even the machines are that good - try looking up Willey Street Ipswich on your new fangled GPS car navigator gismo, or on the WhereIs site on the internet and you will not find it....but , I can assure you that it does exist.
So I used to get a bit flustered if ever I got lost... and I used to get lost a lot - mostly in hilly areas - Jindalee, Wilston, Everton Hills etc. I never really got used to getting lost, although if it was just me in the car it was never so bad - although sometimes the ten minutes service promise used to go out of the window whilst I turned maps upside down and in every direction trying to find how to get to the place where I was to pick up a customer. Then, to make matters worse, a couple of times, lenses fell out of my glasses and even a contact lens popped out once whilst I was trying to find my way around. ‘When it rains it pours!’ as they say.
Now I come to think of it, the only time in my life that I have been booked for speeding was when I had a car full of jabbering passengers who distracted me whilst I was trying to find my way through some back roads across several suburbs and I missed seeing a speed sign at Oxley. I copped a fine and points loss but the cop was very good to me in that he gave me the benefit of the doubt and he downgraded the excess speed that I was doing. I was actually doing 100 in a 60 zone but quite innocently. He put it down as 74km - a very considerate man!
All these thoughts came rushing back today when I went fishing over at the sandhills at Moreton Island and then northwards looking for the elusive spotties. They were there in their thousands at the sand hills last week when I was there but were not to be seen there today so I put out some crab-pots near the sand hills and went north searching for them.
I saw a lot of boats chasing surface activity near Shark Spit and being too lazy to do the slug thing - well too lazy to even tie one on today actually - I drowned a few pillies = one under a float, one on the bottom under a light sinker and one unweighted pilchard sitting around out the back of the boat.
Caught nuthin’!!!! Maneuvered around all over the place drifting now from the upwind side of any surface activity. All I could catch were Grinners! Hell ! - I did not need to come 30 km across the Bay in my little 15 ft Quinnie runabout to do that! I could have done that back at Mud Island much more comfortably!
I must quietly confess though that I am a little relieved in reading in another post this afternoon that Pistol P had similar experiences to mine and a later one by Murks - no bloody fish from all of that surface activity.
Now I am a persistent bugger and I did give all of this surface activity a pretty good shake today but without a reward. Then after a while I noticed that none of the other boats were still around me - they had all gone.
So I finally thought that I might give it all away and just hope to get some crabs from my pots back at the sand hills. Then I thought, “why don’t I go drifting way over there where all of those other boats are?” This was out from Shark Spit - sort of south east from the Measured Mile but a good way away from the MM. There were lots of boats there and the sounder did seem to show a raised area like a bank or a reef but I have absolutely no idea what it was. There would have been a dozen boats there though.
What puzzled me though was that soon after I arrived, they all went. Was it something that I said? - but I had not said anything!
However, seeing as there was at least some sort of structure or changed ocean floor below, I though that I may as well drift across there a bit. The result was a modest feed of school mackeral as you can seen if you click on the thumbnail below. I was pleased to get a reward for the morning’s effort.
After coming home, I looked at the latest Beacon-to-Beacon to see if there was a reef or something shown there but looking at Map 63, there is nothing shown at about where I was.
After a year of intensive fishing whilst on long service leave, I now have a pretty good knowledge of some parts of Moreton Bay, especially Mud Island, but I am an absolute novice in those areas along the inside of Moreton and the northern Bay. All suggestions as to where I was will be gratefully received.
Thankfully, my GPS will help me find the spot again but I would love to know where I was in terms of a named reef or sandbank or something similar.
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Originally Posted by kingtin
