Fishin’ Maggie

First of all, I want to thank everybody who sent their love and support after the death of my father. Dad was a special man, (as they all are), and he loved the island. He built the Magnetic Adventure & Hire counter many years ago, and rebuilt most of the inside of my big boat. One of Dads favourite tales was when he caught and lost a monster fish during a trip out to the shoals with Tony (who used to be a cop on the Maggie.)  Dad was never a very good fisherman and true to form this day he snagged the reef. The drag was set loose and he was winding like crazy but course nothing was happening. Eventually after he yanked and swore enough the line snapped. Tony and I had a quiet chuckle at the time, and over the years that fish he “lost” got bigger and bigger in his stories.

Congratulations to Matt, who landed a magnificent 14 kg Cobia off Horseshoe Bay in his little tinny. It was just on sundown, and Matt was about to pull stumps when he hooked up the hard fighting beast. I also hear he carted it into the Marlin Bar for show and tell. Well done mate.

Scott told me an amazing story of taking a couple of backpacker’s out to WestPoint for a quiet fish on sundown. While he was standing in the water fishing an 8 foot plus brute of a shovel nose shark came cruising through very shallow water right in front of the boys, with his massive dorsal sticking right out of the water. Something strange happened just in front of them and there was a frenzy of big Mullet jumping out of the water and the giant shark thrashing around to the amazement of onlookers. Of course, as usual it all happened too fast for anyone to pull a camera out. Shovelnose sharks aren’t designed to eat mullet, so maybe they just scared each other.

Apart from Josh dropping a huge meter plus Barra at the mangroves last week, most of the top action has been around Horseshoe Bay area. Massive schools of bait are bringing in all sorts of predators, Queenie’s, GT’s , Mackerel, Tarpon, big sharks,Wolf Herring and other species are in huge numbers and hungry. Geoff, Bill and Matt joined many others who hooked up on Queenies to 1.4 m in Horseshoe Bay following the fast moving bait. That’s some big fish.

IDFISH

There is a new Australian fish identification app called “Idfish”, which has a brilliant step through fish identification  process. It is well worth having, especially if you are new to NQ fishing. We put it to the test this week after Bill W caught a fish this week that neither of us could ID, and I couldn’t find it in Grants Fish . It looked a bit like a Trevally that had mated with a Wolf Herring. (Yuck)

ID fish did not have it in their database but after 24 hours after we sent an email with a pic we had a reply and it is getting added to the database. The fish concerned was a False

Trevalley, (Lactarius Lactarius) and is is a very unusual fish. With no cousins and its name is what it isn’t.

Remember, “To the world it may be just one fish but to me it is the World”

Until next time gone Fishin’…. be back dark-thirty

Cheers Dale

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