Hello all,
I haven't logged in here for a while. It looks like the old offshore forum isn't getting many new threads - so I have one for all you long time members. I've copied an pasted it from another website report I did. Yes it's September just gone.
Back in September I spent 15 days fishing on North West Island off Gladstone in the Great Barrier Reef. It’s an annual pilgrimage for a group of Sunshine Coast fishos that I join every now and again. There’s 25 blokes, 6 big boats and 2 tinnies. There’s also 3 pallets of beer, mess tents, 2 ovens, 3 gas freezers, 3 gas fridge freezers, a commercial deep fryer, two smokers and this year a television with a digital set top box to watch the footy finals. Everything is gas or 12 volt – there’s no generators allowed on the island.
The island is only a tiny sand cay with walking tracks only. Everything is carried by hand off the chartered landing barge and then carried back on (except the beer) when its time to go home. It takes a full two days to set up and 1.5 days to pull down.
I took my big boat and with the 5 others we drive across the day before the rest of the crew to set up the tents etc.
The island is surrounded by fringing reef and the lagoon dries at low tide meaning access to the sea is restricted to 3 hours over the top of the tide or you go to see for at least 10 hours coming and going on the high. One day in perfect weather the tide wasn’t high enough for me to exit the lagoon so my crew and I were restricted to drinking deer on the beach listening on the radio to everyone catching good fish.
All up I had 7 fishing trips in my boat ranging from one 24 hour sortie to one quick 2 hour mackerel dash. We did quite a few 12 hours either leaving or coming home in the dark which were highly successful. The biggest red emperor of the trip went 12.4kgs while we managed a Spanish at 15kgs a Gold Spot Snapper at 7.6kg and a GT that snapped a rod and went nearly 40kgs before being successfully released. All the bread and butter species are caught like Red Throat, Spangled Emperor, Coral Trout, Cods, Wrasse, Husser, Nannagai. My favourite form of fishing is big 7 inch soft plastics which means no bait mess and much better quality of fish. One morning my mate (Brooksy) and I had 12 good fish in the boat on plastics before the two bait fishos onboard had landed anything.
The award for the trip went to one poor unfortunate soul who go so drunk on the way over on the barge that he snapped his ankle and didn’t even set foot on the island – forced to return on the barge before a helicopter picked him up in Gladstone and flew him to Rockhampton where had surgery to implant 2 plates and 9 screws. He still received his share of the fish when we got home.
Brett
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