Fishing with Cousin Kwan

Went to visit my cousin Kwan and his wife Kim in Seventeen Seventy.

Getting there involves first flying to Brisbane.

Then taking a Dash-8 turboprop flight to Budaberg (I’d forgotten how noisy propeller planes are).

Didn’t get to Kwan’s farm until late but our first project was to try to fix his Simrad fishfinder.

It needed a new FFC/FPC flat ribbon cable.

All fixed!

Pano of Kwan’s farm.

This fuel bill for the boat exceeded the price of my first car.

We weren’t sure about the weather but chanced it with a midday start. Turned out the conditions were pretty good and the swell was way lower than the forecast.

There were plenty of dolphins around and we soon found a school of tuna. Tried casting to them but they weren’t interested. At another spot we started catching a fish on every cast using a metal lure generously given to me by Yufei.

Then I hooked a really solid fish with my 10kg travel rod. This is what it thought of my tackle.

The first decent fish we landed was a golden travelly on the metal lure.

Then a cobia slammed my bait. After a tense fight on 25kg gear, we got it in the boat.

The next day we went crabbing in Baffle Creek using Kwan’s small boat. The outboard had been completely serviced by Kwan (engine control unit, water pump, carby) except for the fuel filter which was supposedly new and installed by the previous owner. Guess what didn’t work?

Unfortunately, we didn’t catch any crabs or mangrove jack. However, we collected lots fresh mullet with a cast net for the following offshore trip.

On the King’s Birthday, we went offshore again with Craig. Conditions were very lumpy and not great for fishing. On the way out, the anchor release failed so we couldn’t use the anchor winch.

Craig hooked up to a cobia that quickly buried him. This happened several times to each of us. We caught lots and lots of remora (in fact it was Kwan’s personal best day for this species).

Without the anchor winch, and the wind blowing in the opposite direction to the tide, the anchor rope got tangled on both outboards. Any sensible person would have just cut the rope but that would have lost the anchor and ending fishing for the day. So Kwan jumped in the water and promptly got smashed against the knife-sharp propeller putting a large cut on his chest. Moreover, we had to use the other outboard to get slack in the rope while Kwan was in the water. I was so afraid he would get churned into mince that I stopped taking photos.

Anyway, it took about 10 minutes to get everything sorted and Kwan came back into the boat with bleeding hands and chest. As an additional prize, he was bitten by stinging jellyfish.

Then we started catching fish. There were thousands of trevally around. Here is Kwan with a particularly nice one.

We could tell the next fish was big when it hit. It took Craig around the front of the boat so he passed the rod to Kwan from starboard to bow, and then back to me on the port side. The fish came up to the surface quite quickly and Craig made short work of it on his 30kg gear. After about 3 or 4 gaff shots (they are slippery and have big scales), we could take a photo of this really nice cobia.

As the conditions were quite rough, we returned to the boat ramp early. We only took a few trevally, an emperor and the cobia.

The cobia weighed about 11 kg.

Quite a lot of fillets.

On the final day we tested a 45kW sandblaster that Kwan picked up for a song. A little redneck engineering was involved, but we think it needs more power on startup than Kwan’s 3-phase inverter can supply.

We finished the trip with a fire, as it got bitterly cold (down to about 15 celcius that night). Thanks so much to Kwan, Kim and Craig for their hospitality and making this a truly memorable trip.