Mud Island - Wednesday morning 8 November 2006

[charleville]

If it wasn't for me, most of the kids that I went to school with would have had much smaller marbles collections.

I was hopeless at playing marbles and actually don't ever remember winning any at all. I just seemed to be continually losing them to other kids whose marble bags grew fatter and fatter after every game that I had with them.

Not that it really mattered to me. My older brother was actually pretty good at playing marbles and had built up quite a handsome hoard of them, including some of those 'catseyes' and other "special" marbles. He was much older than me so by the time that I had started to squander the family marble fortune, he was pretty well over the pastime anyway. Whew!

Now that I look back on it, it all seems like such a nonsense. Kids who were really good at the fairly useless (in terms of life skills generally) skill of winning at marbles would lord it over the poor suckers like me who would persist at trying to beat them and who fundamentally funded their wealth of marbles; but at the end of the day, it was all pointless. None of those marble fortunes made one iota of difference to improving the lot of any of their owners. The wealth was transitory, superficial, and entirely of trivial importance.

Indeed, one of the learnings of the first nine months of my current 13 month long service leave is just how little money one actually needs to live quite comfortably on. This is of course once you have paid off your house and any other debts; and when don't have the expenses associated with going to work - things like cafe bought lunches and drinks, the tools of trade whether they be hammers and circular saws or business suits and fares/petrol to go to work etc.

...but it is true. In the first month or two after commencing my leave, I spent a lot at Bunnings and in tackle shops. However, now that most of the jobs that I wanted to do around the home are done and I have most of the fishing stuff that I would like, the cost of living mostly comes down to the cost of food and utilities like power and phone, rates etc. - oh, and a bit of bait, of course. It does not cost much to live at all.

A yank ex-stockbroker named Joe Dominguez really proved all of this in a book called "Your Money or Your Life" that he wrote several years ago with his partner Vicki Robin. http://www.yourmoneyoryourlife.org/ Joe retired at 31 and died in recent years at 61 but demonstrated both in the book and in his own lifestyle that one can live on a lot less than you earn if you don't have all of the costs of going to work, plus if you lose a few bad habits.

None of that should surprise me really. My late Mum lived on a single old age pension for 32 years and lived very comfortably and in fact managed to save quite a bit of money along the way. Quite impressive actually.

On the other hand, think about the salary paid last year to the head of Macquarie Bank, Alan Moss. It was $21.2 Million! ...or the $7.7M that the last CEO of the Commonwealth Bank received in the three months of last financial year before handing over the reins to the new guy for the remaining 9 months of the year.; or the $12.8M that the CEO of Leightons received last year; or the $8.4 M that the CEO of Woolies received , or ... ah well you get my drift.

How would those guys ever spend these amounts of money??? Beats me.

The fact is that no one could spend these sorts of sums unless they just squandered it on executive jets and other displays of status. Not unlike the kids with all of the marbles, really. They just want to show off that they have more marbles even if those marbles just sit there and do nothing. Reminds me a bit of all of those big boats with lots of marine growth on their hulls down at the Manly boat harbour.

But it does show that, unchecked by a good dose of home grown logic such as you will find in Joe Dominguez's book, we can all become quite greedy for no real benefit. I still think that it is quiet sad that Kerry Packer, Australia's richest man decided that he had had enough of life at just 68 years of age. He was a pup in terms of the expected life-spans of most of the people reading this. His money gave him worries but not as many years of life as the average Aussie.

"So what has all of this to do with fishing?" you are undoubtedly asking by now.

Simply this - people are inherently greedy for gains beyond what is actually usable no matter how hard they could try to spend it - and in my own limited way, I am just as greedy as anyone. Not that long ago, I would have been over the moon if I had brought home a 41 cm squire. Now, I am disappointed if that is all that I bring home from a fishing trip. I have become greedy! Perhaps not as greedy as the guys taking home ten or twenty million in salary but greedy nonetheless. A 41 cm fish is a good catch. I should be happy!

I seized one of the few good weather opportunities this morning to go fishing and totally lacking any imagination , I went fishing at Mud Island...and in banker's hours too, having left Manly boat harbour at about 8.45am to fish through the 11.19am high tide.

The morning was magnificent. A 5 knot north-easterly made no impact at all on the surface of the water and I made super fast time getting to Mud from Manly.
I anchored a little south of my spot thinking that when the tide turned, it would swing me around to be right on the spot. That plan actually did not work as by the time the tide turned, that gentle north-easter had turned into almost 20 knots and kept my boat in its same position notwithstanding that the current should have been taking it in the other direction.

Action was a bit slow. Lots of small grassies and a bit of fun from a 1.2m shark which I did get to the side of the boat but let it go. Not sure what sort of shark. It did not have those slits of eyes of the gummy sharks that I have caught there before so I do not know what it was.

The only keeper that I caught is the one that is shown below. It is a perfectly good catch, being the equivalent of maybe a half dozen whiting in meat quantity - or at least three or four of the bream that I used to catch when I was a land based fisherman. I should be pleased with it...and I suppose I am...but I just wish that I had caught more.

Ah well, never mind. Maybe next time...

The winds were very light and the seas were dead flat until 11.45am when a solid northeasterly change blew in in an instant. As will be seen on the follow-up post to this, that change turned into 20 knots as I was returning home to Manly at 1pm. It has since gone close to 40 knots. No fishin’ for the rest of the day at Mud Island, fellas.

The squire was caught on a pilchard head on an unweighted 6/0 penetrator hook.

a nice fish - but another woukld have been nice - and a bigger one too - and perhaps a nice estuary cod as a side order - and perhaps ....

[charleville]

Today's weather change ...

[Pitsta]

Bloody good read once again Charleville . I suppose we are all a bit greedy in one way or another ! Mine lately has been time spent on the water & the wifes gettin p!ssed !!!!!

Mark

[alleycat]

Hey where did you get that wind chart mate??.

[Fishin_Dan]

Hey Charlie - If you had of been in a competition those marbles could have bumped you up a few spots with that Squire!!!

[charleville]

Hey where did you get that wind chart mate??.

seabreeze.com.au

[foggy]

Charlie,

Mate I was begining to think you were a vampire that could not go out in daylight. That would have to be the first time I have read a daylight report from you. i was working up the coast when that change came through and it was strong, blowing crap everywhere. But I still mananged to sneak down to the barra park for a quick fish.

Foggy

[dynamicspot]

was just putting the boat back on the trailer just made it in time



Greg

[Jeremy]

With time on the water, skills should be improving and we should expect more of ourselves. Nothing wrong with pushing yourself to the next level. I reckon there is something wrong if you aren't expecting more of yourself over time.

Jeremy