March 31, 2006 Opal Mining Update - No 59 Having a good time fishing.

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We are now into our second month of our holidays, last month was sure a mixed up month for us, turns out we only got to fish on 11 days, went back into Port Lincoln 11 times and the rest of the time stayed at home, nearing in mind we could not go fishing for the first week we was here due to the weather. But we are nearly finished with decking out the new (2nd hand) 4x4, have a couple more things to do this month to the boat and a little bit of sight seeing to do, to check out another Bay that we may go to next year, it is not far from Port Lincoln and is north of there so we get to it on the way down, before we get to Port Lincoln, supposed to be a better fishing spot than here, so will have a look and check it out, talk to a few locals and see what is available for rent and at what price as it is bigger then here where we are so I have been told. Last month we only caught 49 whiting and one Gummy Shark, thought we would have caught more, but there is a lot of water out there and a lot of spots that produce fish that we have to find out about, cannot learn about a new place in a couple of weeks and some of the spots out in deeper water require better weather than fishing inside the bay. Although this is a windy place and seems to always have a decent chop on the water, but we do not mind fishing in a 3 or 4 foot swell, its the getting back to shore that is the problem, have top travel slow about 10 knots so we do not get a pounding and depending on the wind direction if we get a soaking or not, although we do have wet weather jackets. This is the seconded Abalone Farm and this is the boat that is working on it, I think they dive on the Abalone using what is called a hooker from what I can see, not allowed to get to close as they have boundaries markers and we are not allowed inside them, so this is the best I could do.

This was good day for us, 13 Whiting, 1 Squid and 1 large (for here) Parrot Fish which pure white flesh and very good eating, very hard for us to drop on a good spot, we have to keep moving until we can get a bite then hope there is a few around for us to catch, if we get 2 or 3 from one spot we are doing well.

Here as you can see is a Kangaroo and a big one at that, there is a Doe (Female) just to the right of photo, this feller is what we call a Boomer (Male) Pat when out the back around 10 pm to put some rubbish out in the bin which is to the left of photo and saw this big feller, I was sitting down watching TV when I heard this Scream from the back door, then Pat came back in this guy was near the veranda, I don't know who got the biggest fright, Pat or the Kangaroo, so I got the camera and took this photo.

This guy may not look big from this photo as he is crouched down, but standing up he would be over 6 foot high, I used to be a Professional Kangaroo Shooter in my younger days from 1968 to 71, when they brought in Licensing for Professional Shooters and 300 of us that were Professional did not get a License as they only issued 40 of them, so a lot of people were put out of work, they said that they were getting shot out, but we, the Professional knew different. As Statistics were keep by the people who processed them and as there was more getting shot every year so they could not be getting less, was within a year that the Cockies (Sheep Farmers) were paying shooters to just go out and shoot the Roo's and leave them where they was as the skin or meat could not be sold without a tag on it and if you did not have a license you could not get hold of the tags, there was that many the Farmers were having trouble on there property with them, anyway that is all a memory now, just thought I would mention that bit of trivia of my past life. Here we are launching the boat at Farm Bach, like this spot as is not far to travel in the boat now if the weather is rough, the trailer wheels are just over the drop off at low tide, it is not this good all the time here, in the morning it is reasonably calm most times, easy to get the boat off like this as I have to float the boat off as it sits on the rails to much but will get this fixed later on so we can roll it off, you can also see that I have now got the Roof Rack and the Spare Wheel Carrier fitted on, stupid idea having the spare wheel fitted underneath the vehicle especially where we live and travel.

Pat holding the boat while I park the vehicle and trailer up on the beach, I will have to take the boat into Port Lincoln and get the sun cover cut down, nice for keeping the sun off us but a bitch for fishing from, there is to many bars and straps around the back end and we cannot cast from the boat or bring in a fish with the rods, we have to get hold of the line to lift and bring the fish in, this has resulted in some fish falling off the hook before we could get them in the boat, so it will be made smaller and stronger and will not have lay it down for traveling to and from the fishing spot, nice day though for fishing, hope the fish are going to be on the bite.

Days fishing done, not many in the boat again, think the fish had the day off due to the nice weather, I am about to winch the boat on with the hand winch, after I have taken this photo, would love to show you how it is in high wind with a bit of a swell up, very hard to manage the boat, Pat has to try and winch the boat on while I try and control the back end of it until it gets to hard for here, then I have to take over, but there are times that the water is shallower than this if we do not want to run the 4x4 back into the water. So we have to beach the boat as far as we can on the sand and then back the trailer up to it and then what is called dry winch the boat on, this is very hard for us, so we will be also getting a 12 volt power winch put on soon, this will make it a lot easier for us  now and in the future as we are getting old and weaker every year. Today is Friday the 3rd, for this guy he must be thinking it was the 13th, this is the truck that comes and picks up the Crayfish off the boat in the background, they ferry the crays from the Cray Boat in a small dingy to the beach, but this time he has parked the truck on the soft wet sand and has got stuck.

I went and asked him when I got there and saw the problem if it was worth a Cray to try and get him out, well if you don't ask you will never receive right and there are normal amateur fisherman like me who I would help at anytime as I would expect from them if I was in trouble, but these are Pros and can afford it for being so stupid to park a 5 ton truck on wet sand with the tide coming in, anyway he said that it was up to the Boss which is the guy with the red  shirt next to the 4x4 in the photo above. So as I had just got there and still had the boat on I had to get it launched first anyway as I would have to take the trailer off, but as they had not said that they wanted my help I continued to launch the boat, it was after I had got the boat in and this Idiot of a driver had tried to get himself out and got himself deeper in the sand whit the boss telling him what to do I might add. The boss came up to me and asked if I would help him if I could, so I said OK, but I had a brand new Tow Strap, that I bough last year after helping a couple of girls out with it and they buggered it up and had to pay for it also, so I made it clear that if I broke it trying to get him out he would have to pay me $70.00 for it, to which he agreed, so I took the trailer off and got ready. Not being big headed, but I already knew that I could not be of any help to him now, I weight 2 tons and he weighs in at 5 tons and I did not know it then but they already had loaded some Crays in the back, quite a few, so that was another few hundred pounds in weight, but anyway I hooked up on him and tried but could not budge him, by this time his back duel wheels on the right side were about 6 or 7 inches in the sand and the front ones were in about 3 inches so he was stuck and dead weight. So I was outweighed, then another 4x4 came and asked if he could help us out and had the same tow strap, so we were the same length, but this was a Ute and lighter, so was at least a ton too light, if we could have got another 4x4 like me, we may have had some chance but we could not budge him, but at least we tried. So I packed the tow strap away and went to hook back on the trailer and park it when the Boss man good to his word the told driver to get me a decent Cray out, this is when I realized that he had crays in the back as he was unloading them into the water to make the truck lighter, now he unloads the truck, I tell you some people just don't have it up top, anyway you can see he gave us a real Beauty, it weighed in at 1.7 kilos when I got it home, kept it alive by putting in our big red fish box and covering it with sea water, them put the fish in another box we use as a killing box.

Now we are on our way out fishing, the Boss man has gone with the other 4x4 to try and find a farmer with a tractor to pull him out, but this now some 20 minutes after I have tried and you can see the crates of Crays in the water they are stacked 3 deep and 2 rows wide and there was more to come as we saw when we was fishing just off shore for about 1/2 an hour. You can see how the water is coming in and the truck in now in water, it was at least another 1/2 an hour before we saw a tractor come and get him out, I wanted to go back in as I was only about 500 yards off shore to take another photo to see how high the water had come up the wheels but Pat said to go out to our fishing spot as we had wasted enough time around here, so off we went.

And what a good day we had, the best yet for us here, the weather was perfect, we caught 19 whiting, 1 red mullet (Goat-Fish) and 1 Cray, perfect, wish every fishing day was as good as this but it aint going to happen, with the weather, the moon, the tide and the fact the fish do move around, so finding them is easy to get them to bite is the hard part, we know we are on top of fish just about every time we go out but have trouble in catching our quota, all this make fishing a very interesting hobby.

For those of you that have not seen a Rock Lobster up close here he is or she, not sure what sex this one is, it has at some stage lost 3 of its legs on the left side  and was growing new ones, but when it was cooked there was a lot of meat in it, never had one this big before, surprised how much meat was in it, cooking time was 15 minutes a Kilo so this was cooked for 25 minutes in sea water.

This is the new 12 volt Power Winch for the boat, works like a charm, Pat can now do the winching while I do the control bit with the boat in the water, the black knob is the clutch and the silver arm at the front of it is the switch which only works one way, so is easy to use.

This bird follows us around every day we go out, I am sure it is the same one, as soon as we get settled on a spot there it is every time, pain is the rear on most occasions as I do like to throw out a line with a Pilchard on and just a Pilchard, called a Free Floater, the bait has sinks under its own weight including the hooks of course and I have it so it around 20 feet off the bottom hoping to catch a bigger fish as it is swimming around, but with this bird around, it goes for the bait as soon as I cast it out so I cannot do this type of fishing so long as it is near me, hard to get rid of.

This a Cray Fishing Boat, you can see it has some Cray Pots stacked on deck, is coming back into Coffin Bay, this is one of the smaller boats we have seen here, still its worth a lot of money to set up.

These are the caravans that are parked on the Beach at Farm Beach, there is a Caravan Park just behind the hill in the background, don't know if they use the Ablutions there or not, but some of them are lived in for up to six months of the year so I have been told in-between seasons on the farm, not a bad live if you can get away with it and afford it also. But the beach is superb small in width but hard for driving on and at the road end where we come in there is a sign that says the beach is subject to the road rules, so I suppose that means there can be no speeding on it or drunk driving, don't know how they would police it as there is no police stationed here in Coffin Bay.

There is a lot of Dolphins out from this Farm Beach, we came across a Pod of about 11 as far as we could count, hard when they are all diving and coming up for air at different times, I was just pulling up the anchor to move when they came near me, so when I started the engine I moved towards them an sure enough some came to play in the bow waves, there is 3 in this photo the 3rd one is just under the water on the left next to the one on the left side of the bow, playful animals aren't they.

Trust Pat to catch anything that is unusual, here she has caught a hook on a big Starfish, big useless thing it is, took the hook out and threw it back, would not know how to cook it anyway.

Her is the boat with the sun cover cut down, now we can fish with ease, I was not given a lot of choice when I got the boat in Queensland and the small cover that I could have had was to low for me and Pat so went for the seconded choice the big one, but turns out that I could have made what I wanted if I could have talked to the person who makes them as they can be made in many ways, this one now is not anchored on the side of the boat, but on the hand rails that go around inside of the window screens, can still fold down but on the inside of the boat, which is also better for us when we pack it up for traveling and put the Storm Cover on, now this will be inside and not on the outside.

This is Point Sir Isaacs, the far most Northern tip of the Coffin Bay Peninsula and where we go fishing now if the weather is right for us as it is 11 miles across to here from Farm Beach were we launch the boat, we have found that around this area there are some very big Whiting.

This a photo of the local map of the area, so you can see where we go fishing, if we launch at the boat ramp which is a Coffin Bay, we go near the Brothers Islands that is around a 6 mile trip one way, we did in the beginning go out to and around that Point Longnose and fish if front of that Seven Mile Beach, but is along way to come back when the wind is up and the sea is rough, get a pounding all the way in, so when I got this Toyota Landcruser I could go and try the Farm Beach, did not want to use the other vehicle as it had a blown head gasket and had to get rid of it, now we go and launch off the beach. Although it is a 48 kilometer around trip with the vehicle, it is better for us as we can now go to better and deeper fishing spots where there are bigger fish, in the Whiting Dept that is, there are a lot of places to go fishing out in that Coffin Bay Area and at different depths anywhere from 10 feet to 104 feet, although the deepest we fish in is 70 feet.

This is called a Port Jackson Shark and is a protected species, harmless as it has no teeth but has crushing plates like the Gummy Shark and the Sting Rays, although it has a sharp spike sticking out in front of the front and rear Dorsal Fins, (you can just see then if you look hard) this one is about 2.5 feet long and Pat caught it, also caught another one a few days later than this one, put this back in the water as soon a I had taken the photo.

This is a Leather Jacket, good eating fish hard to catch with the hooks we use, not that we are using big hooks for Whiting, but this type of fish has a very small mouth, so if I was to fish for them with a smaller hook I would get more, but we are trying for Whiting, They are called Leather Jackets because of the skin being like Leather and we shin these fish, just cut the head off from behind the eyes across to in front of the anal fin, as the front is all gut etc, then you just peal a bit of the skin back and pull it all off and you are left with white meat, than I fillet it, there are many types of Leather Jackets, this one is quite big and very colorful.

This is another type of Whiting, I have no idea what the name of it is, as this is the first time I have ever seen it, but it is a whiting, blends in with the green weed that it lives in, I have caught another 2 of them since this photo, but as they are very small I put them back where they belong.

This is the King George Whiting, this one is 38 centimeters (14.96 inches) long and the biggest I/we have caught so far, the mechanic here has told me that the biggest he has caught was 52 centimeters long (20.5 inches) and the guy who did our Window Tinting caught one that was 55 centimeters long (21.65 inches) and as fat as a big mans wrist so they do grow pretty big, so mine was still a baby, looking forward to getting a bigger one, but may have to wait until next year as we still have a few spots to learn about yet.

This was a mixed bag for the day, only 8 whiting but caught 8 Silver Trevally, another Leather Jacket and a Dusky Flathead, which gives 2 excellent solid fillets and is a top eating fish better that the whiting, called Dusky because it is very dark brown and patchy on top almost black in appearance, would not mind catching more of these, have to handle then with great care as they have 2 small very sharp spikes on each side of the gill plates and move there head from side to side when caught and handled, have been spiked a few times already with he small ones we catch even though I use a towel doubled as I have to remove these for Pat and any other that has spikes. Whiting are very safe to handle as they have no such defense, just have to watch the tails on the bigger ones as we grab them behind the head with our bare hands and in most cases hold then to our chest to get the hook out and they go crazy, so are nicknamed Ball Bashers, for the men anyway, put your name on them for the women, still not a good day fishing as I got 7 of the Silver Trevally within 15 minutes and 1 whiting. Pat caught 1 Silver Trevally in that time, then is was keep moving around until it was time to come home, we then stopped at a Channel Marker about 1/2 mile off shore from the beach where the x4 is and there we picked up the Flathead, Leatherjacket and 3 whiting and we were fishing from 9am until 3:15 which was later for us, we normally quit around 2 pm and head for the beach, but the weather was very good this, too good as the sea was very calm all day.

This morning as we went out my outboard engine alarm was going off but could not hear it properly because of the wet weather jackets with the hoods over our heads plus with the noise of the outboard and of the boat crashing through the water as the swell was up, then I felt the engine slowing down and then heard this faint screeching noise, took the hood off and realized it was the engine safety switch letting me know the engine was overheating, looked around and smoke was coming from the engine. So quickly switched off the engine, went to the back to see what had happened and lent over the cutting board to have a look at the engine and it gave way, breaking the plastic holders that it is mounted in, as this collapsed it caught a reel on the closest rod and broke the reel off, so that is now scrap. I thought for a moment that I was in serious trouble with the engine, but by the time it took me to get up as I was hanging half over the back of the boat and then lifted the engine up to have a look there was nothing there, this has happened to me and others before, the engine propeller leg would have caught a plastic bag that had wrapped itself around the bottom and covered the water intake holes shutting of the water supply to the engine causing it to overheat, I waited a few minutes for it to cool down and switched the ignition back on and the alarm still went off so the engine was not cool enough yet. But started the engine to see if there was any damage and it run OK and water came from the top of the motor from what they call the Tell Tale, so you can see that water is flowing through the engine, I switched it off again for another couple of minutes and then started it again the alarm was still going off, so started the engine and let it idle getting the cold water to run through it and within a few seconds the alarm went off, so all was well and we continued, was only about 3/4 a mile from where we was going fishing and about 1/4 of a mile from this Fishing Trawler. So I could have got help from them if I had been stuck as they were stopped here cleaning there net and catch and would have had to come straight past me on the way in, they could have give me a tow if I had required one, law of the sea, cannot refuse me help, but lucky for me it was not required and we continued fishing, was not a good start to the day and it did not get a lot better for Pat anyway, we caught 13 whiting that day and I caught 12 of them so Pat did not do well and was not happy with me for breaking the board and reel, as I could have removed it out of the way, but didn't, what can I say.

Well the holidays have come to an end, sorry that I could not how you more fish, there are different kinds here but they catch them more in the winter months when we are not here, even the whiting that we came here for are more plentiful in the winter months, still we have done alright the freezer is 3/4 full so I have quite enough to last us for a few months. We will be back fishing next year, would like to come back here but will not say for sure as 10 months is a long time and anything can happen in that time, it has taken us a while to learn some of the fishing spots here and there are still more that I don't know yet but have been told about, hard to catch fish every day even where you caught them the day before does not mean that you will catch them there today as we have found out. Now it is back to Coober Pedy for us, we leave on Saturday the 1st of April early in the morning around 5:30 morning for home and will be back that evening as it is a one day drive from here for a change, my wife Patricia starts back at work on the Monday and I will have to get the mining truck back in action, then its down to Ross's to get back into the repairing of the blower, which if you remember is replacing the fan housing, so the next newsletter we will be back to normal on mining and the problems Again I Hope you have enjoyed this issue and look forward to the next one, hopefully I will have some more good photos to show you in the next issue and maybe some of Good Looking Opal and lots of it, I am still hoping that this will be a good year for us, but only time will tell, so stay with us over the next few months and find out what goes on in our part of the world as far as Opal Mining goes. Stay Tuned for the next Issue, who knows what I will have to report. Until the next issue......... and wish me lots of LUCK. Cya Later, Stuart Bird. To return back to the Archived Page for more Updates click, Here!

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