Port Stephens
All the planning was done, the weather checked every hour for the last week, the crew of four tracked down & hand picked from a wide selection of many willing applicants…. Four in total.
Boat is packed & lines are rigged. You can feel the excitement in your pants as the crew, one by one enters my garage with their new flashy gear. So when Stinga comes and & quietly mentions to us that he has forgot his wallet & we need to make a detour at 4.00am to go back & get it alarm bells started ringing….
We had no experience whatsover prior to this port stephens trip. None of us had ever fished for marlin let alone 2 of us never game fishing at all. It was fair to say the odds were against us before we hit the hume hwy. The only information on marlin fishing I knew was what ever I could read in magazines & who ever would kindly answer their phone and answer my questions…
We were to be fishing out of a Haines Signature 520c, with the seats removed for extra room. Mistakes would see our trip turn into somewhat disastrous, although the crew took every hit with a smile and a laugh.
TIMING
A lot of us amatuer fisherman have the same problem. When the fish are on we simply cant drop our lives & chase that dream fish. From talking to experienced marlin fisherman I gathered the best time for us to have a real crack at a marlin would be mid march. After all the riviera’s from the Inter Club tournament had docked back in front of there sydney harbour mantions. While febuary would see one of the hottest marlin bites ever seen in Port Stephens, Storms and cold water would see the marlin pushed south prior to our arrival. On the 4 days we fished for them one charter operator also recorded 4 miss hits. Which somewhat healed our wounds.
TRIP UP THERE
After forgetting his wallet Stinga was conveniantly hung over aswell and couldn’t drive until the afternoon so the rest of the crew took the duties. The trip up there really was a dream. While Stinga was studying for the trip reading the new issue of Blue Water magazine my bro DR Allen was doing some study of a differnet kind. His book of choice. Bonsai 101. & that’s not a joke! 12 hours towing a boat, plenty of conversation, plenty off excitement & a few NRB’s from time to time (NO REASON BONORS) Also there was some mighty fine tunes coming from a few of our asses with the driver having the ability to lock all windows proving to be a nightmare.
After many deliberations throughout the long journey we finally aggreed on a length of time without females where as it would not be gay to have relations with the same sex. Stinga argued 3 weeks was plenty of time but the crew settled on 2.3 years.
We arrived in the evening to discover our sleeping arrangements would be slighty cramped I guess you could say. Now stinga & I have been best mates for years, fished some pretty remote places & slept on nothing more than a bed of sand so when we walked in to see only 2 double beds for 4 blokes it wasn’t a real issue. A luxury if you will. How ever for Lachy (25) & Seado (34 & a beard that screams hide your children) who had only briefly met before it was quite awkward. Seado had been throwing one liners at lachy all trip as they (bonded) in the front seat together & lachy just couldn’t quite pick up his sense of humour. This awkwardness extended when they drew each other out of the hat to sleep in the same bed. Stinga and I laughed it off trying to hide the fact that we rigged it anyway…
FISHING
Halifax boat ramp is the place to launch & the sun was up, the wind down & moral high as I kicked the yama in the guts and reversed her off the trailor for the first time…
As I was waiting for Stinga to park the car I felt the urge to urinate. This was not unusual as I often urinate in the morning. As I am leaning over the boat enjoying my morning pee I felt the need to perform another common morning bodily function. Feeling very confident & expecting this to be no different to any other morning I rise a leg up to get maximum exposure for the gases to release from at a slow yet deep rate. As the function was completed a slight thought ran through my mind……. Did I? Was that? But as I see Stinga quickly running down the ramp I put those thoughts behind me.
45 minutes later, while ripping in mackeral, my fears, once just a passing thought where realized & i had….. Id shat em. As stinga would remind me for the rest of the trip.. Not a great start.
To me marlin fishing = long hours pulling lures. Or so I thought. We spent the whole first day trolling lures around as well as my home made witch doctor, which worked a treat mind you, for nothing.. After a quick drop into Tackleword we found out that this is not the case. Live baiting or Skip baiting is how the majority of marlin are caught as the hook up rate on skirted lures can be less than 30%.
Bait is one thing that was not hard to come by in port stephens. Its nothing like down here in melbourne. Any headland or island hold massive amounts of yakka, slimey mackeral, bonito & stripey tuna. Catching these fish is what kept us going. My brother lachy was convinced he had a small kingy when a big stripey tuna peeled line of his 6 lb gear.
But the best place to catch your bait is on the marlin grounds. The car park, Big Gibba, Seal rocks. We put more time into the Gibba than the cougar put into trying to drag all of us back to here house on the last night…. There is almost constantly a thick 10m high school right on top of the Gibba reef 15nm north of port stephens. These slimeys are caught by simply droping a sabiki jig down to the depth you see them on the sounder. Or to target the stripey tuna which hang around the same areas you can chuck a little soft plastic on with a bit of bait on the hook and hold on as these little things go hard & are a lot of fun.
There are probably a thousands reasons why we didn’t hook up to a marlin but I think definetly one of them was a leaders were far too heavy & our hooks too big. Especially for the little blacks we were chasing on the reefs. Making these leaders even more visible was the fact we had no outriggers which help to hide the leader material by getting most of it in the air.
After all was lost, fishing on only hopes & dreams, on the very last day we drifted over a massive bait ball over the gibba and spot a black marlin cruising the surface & catch the excitement on camera. The heart was racing & I fully expected to see the Penn 24kg start zinging… we waited and waited on top of the school and nothing…
When you’ve never fished for marlin before or on a boat with no one who has its so hard to be sure what youre doing is right. There was such a moment on the third day after slow trolling and drifting livies over mackeral schools all day we decided to pull up and see if we could raise one on the troll. After trolling for 5 minutes just off the big Gibba reef we noticed a boat driving parallel to us & we assumed he must have got the same idea as the fishing was slow.
To our amazement we noticed his rod was bent to the water, his mrs driving & a black marlin of around 100kg fully breach the surface & continue to tail skip its way across the water. What a stunning performance it was. All these years watching marlin on TV shows and we’d actually seen it in real life. Even though it was not on the end of our line it truly was a great experience. After the battle we managed to get close enough to him so we could ask him a few questions. Sure enough he got his fish by doing the same thing we had been doing for 2 straight days, the only difference was he had the confidence in what he was doing was right. We did not.
The option to fish our final 5th day of the journey was thankfully taken out of our hands after our boat decided steering was no longer a necessary item. Unfortunately for Stinga but thankfully for seado & i we would not be stranded out at sea for 3 weeks. On our slow journey back to port, steering old school by turning the motor by hand, even though as fisherman we had reched new lows there was a smile on everyones face. We were beaten men, & how do men deal with lows they have not been to before. They go to the pub & go to the pub we did. Oh & wasn’t that just a hoot.
THE PUB
This was to be a very entertaining evening as we shouted beer after beer and played pool against some of the locals. Stinga being the comedian he thinks he is thought it would be rather humurous to stand at the urinal with his pants & jocks down to his ankles as he urinated thinking that I was coming in next. Well wasn’t the joke on him when 2 middle aged men walked in to the gastly sight of his pastey pimply ass eyeing them off. Stinga feeling too embarressed to move continued to finish his bussiness, pants to the ground as his two new mates joined him. The humility when he had to bend over & pick his pants back up was hilarious.
As we cleaned up the local talent on the pool table a middle aged woman introduced herself to us. It was hard to tell as she was very suttle but we somehow couldn’t help thinking she had some interest towards us as this was her opening line.
“Hi im Barbra, why don’t you guys come back to the penthouse for a drink later? (waves her empty ring finger), Don’t worry im divorced. “
“ yeh sweet, we’ll just check if its ok with our wives & get back to you…” Seado…
her attempts continued throughout the evening untill Stinga finally put a nail in the coffin by asking if she had any single grandaughters around our age?
You think it would have been hard to meet another character much like Barbra… But its Nelson Bay & we found one better.
John Fletcher was his name.
“ ive done 27 fuk’n years, im a crim, a thief I tels ya…. I put a grand over the bar a night ere at dis place, im picking up 5 G’s tommorrow, im seventy fkn five & il take the lot of yas on..” Even though as we went to the toilet he would grab our beers and pour them into his.
“heres my number, you want a fkn pension card? “
“why would I want a pension card im 26? T-DOGG
“You havn a fkn go mate? I know people mate.. I did 27 fkn years. There worth 15 grand il give it to you for 5.. get the money to me tommorrow? What about a licence? You want one? 3 Grand…
But he’s all time quote that will go down in history.
“I am who I am, I did what I did, because I am who I am” John Fletcher.
It was great to finish our trip with so many laughs because we would need that positivity when we blew a bearing out 1 hour from sydney extending our trip time from 12 to 22 hours.
Thank you for reading & everyones help & support after our first failed attempt. We gathered some great footage of the dissapointment and our boat being hauled onto the tow truck.
I hope this blog gives you as many laughs as it gave me writing it.
TDOGG & STINGA
