COCKLING DAY

Our day commenced with meeting at the Goolwa Beach car park to check off attendance and brief people as to where we planned to do our cockling and deflating vehicle tyre pressures in preparation for beach driving. The next step was the ever exciting move of getting onto the main beach without getting bogged in the soft sand of the ramp from the car park down to the harder sand of the main beach. All but one of our crew made it without event. There always has to be one person who gets stuck but fortunately there were a number of friendly beach goers who volunteered to help push our one stuck SUV on its way. Seventeen members and guests enjoyed Cockling Day this year in spite of a blustery north wind blowing sand along the beach and trying to fly the Fishing Association gazebo. However it was warm in the water making it very pleasant catching the slippery clams and hot enough to dry off any wave splash rapidly. Of course we did have a few people who spent more time swimming than cockling as they got bowled over as a result of not watching where the next wave was coming from! Unfortunately the catch was not as plentiful as last year when the 300 piece limit was rapidly harvested. Next year the Club’s Hospitality Manager, Frank Mammome, will be in charge with finding the cockles for the team as he did report a good catch on the week before we went. I wonder if his party cleaned out the patch we went to! Nevertheless there was enough to replenish the bait supply and some left over for the spaghetti vongole and judging by some of the conversation over lunch I suspect more of the catch went to the ‘Vongole’ than into the bait freezer! My thanks to all who attended or apologised if they could not. With a reduction in numbers catering was more than adequate and our sausage sizzle went down very well (some BYO helped also). After lunch and a clean-up several members retreated to the local ice-cream shop for the obligatory dessert on their way home.

Vlad Humeniuk, Fishing Association Chair