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Editorial Letters Spear?Tips STUFF! Kosters Kitchen GreatShot08 Spearo’s Gallery Spearing Sydney DEEP Spearfishing MPA

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Cover

Cover - Paul McKeown WA Mulloway

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F

iji is an island nation in the Sth Pacific, over 4,500km from the East coast of Australia. Fiji is made up of 332 islands approximately 222 of which are uninhabited, and all of which are potential dive destinations for your next adventure. The waters around Fiji are warm, averaging around 26 degrees Celsius, and clear with the potential to produce everything from excellent reef fishing right up to unforgettable blue water hunting for large pelagics such as tuna, wahoo and marlin.

Getting There

The rain and cold of Sydney’s winter was enough to force myself and dive buddy Brendan Page to part with some of our hard earned money and to book a flight to Fiji with few plans other than to dive as much as possible for the next two weeks. Our flights cost us around $600 AU, departing Sydney and arriving in Nadi on Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu, with a flight time of around 3.5 hours.

Before you depart Australia I recommend doing your home work, research is an important factor for a successful trip and will allow you to make the most of your opportunities abroad. It is a good idea to make a rough game plan of where you want to go and what you want to see before you leave home but you must be flexible with these plans and a ‘go with the flow’ attitude will save you a lot of stress.

Our home base for the trip was to be Mana Island, a member of the Mamanuka group, an island chain off the West coast of Viti Levu. To get there you can take a taxi to the Denarau Marina (Nadi) for a few dollars and

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EENDRACHTS LAND - 1616

Dirk Hartog, captain of the Eendracht sailing eastward on the newly discovered ‘short cut’ to the East Indies, turns northward and on October 25th land is sighted. Hartog noted in his log of seeing several uninhabited islands with a vast land mass behind them. He lands on the northern end of the island and spends two days exploring the area. To mark his discovery of this desolate spot he nails a pewter plate with details of his crew to a wooden post and sets it firmly at the northern tip of what is now Dirk Hartog Island. It read:

The first recorded landing on Australian soil by a European in an area that is now known as Shark Bay.

The Zuytdorp

History In the winter of 1712 the VOC ship Zuytdorp left the Cape Town for the East Indies, she disappeared without trace. Tom Pepper, a stockman, found the wreckage of the Zuytdorp strewn about the base of the rugged sandstone cliffs close to Shark Bay in 1927 whilst hunting dingoes. Close to the waves on the reef platform Tom Pepper found a 30m stretch of silver coins, it was reported that when the tide rose you could hear the metal symphony of thousands of ‘pieces of eight’ washing back and forth with the waves. Coincidently our club trip was exactly in the first week of June 2008, 296 years later.

Shark bay

So named by William Dampier in 1688 because of its teeming populations of sharks!! French explorer Nicholas Baudin in 1803 described the harsh landscape “as barren as the Sinai desert” and the cliffs as ‘the iron coast’ because of their dangerous and stark nature.

Hugh Edwards 1950s - wrote:

‘when we arrived at the Shark Bay pub and said we’d come to go spearfishing they looked at us sorrowfully’....“you wont last ten minutes in that water, son,” said an old fisherman, whose salt hardened paws made the thick hotel glass he was holding seem a fragile and delicate thing. “Mad—stark, raving mad,” said someone else.

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by Tony Humphreys

Coastal scratching for Gold and Silver Tails.

Coastal visibility in North Queensland and especially the Townsville area rarely gets much better than that. With several large river systems, estuaries and mangrove lined creek mouths with a shallow basin extending out to the Great Barrier Reef our close coastal visibility throughout the year is generally between 1 to 3 mtrs increasing the further out you go. We are however blessed with several large coral fringed islands including Magnetic Island and the Palm Island Group which contains approximately 14 islands. Visibility around these

Is it good enough to dive? Yeah, must be at least 3 metres! islands is generally 3 to 10 mtrs. It is in this dirtier closer inshore area that every year local divers await winter for the visibility to increase slightly and the opportunity to chase coastal species like Barramundi and the Fingermark or Golden Snapper as they’re now known. Generally you’ll find yourself crawling along the bottom around rocky headlands with a short 1 mtr gun packed with a 20mm rubber ready to smash through some big silvery scales. The shots are often taken out into the gloom as you’ve anticipated the fishes direction of travel as they’ve sped past with big silvery tails sounding ‘BOOM’. Fingermark will often school into a large ball with the biggest fish commanding the pecking

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by Reid Forrest

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e headed out of Havelock early in the morning on what was really an average forecast, with the tides going all the wrong the way....... Oh well so be it, I hadn’t been in the water for far too long with all the training for the Coast to Coast race and the usual long hours at work.....

On the way out we looked in at 2 spots that often held Kingfish and they were green as a leprechaun the day after St Patricks Day. So with our hopes of 10m plus viz (fantastic conditions for around the Marlborough Sounds) dashed, we kept the hammer down and headed towards the outer sounds and if need be out into Cook Strait.

The next pinnacle we tried near Pelorous Sound Entrance had vis around 7-8m, but very hazy with a lot of loose silt hanging in the water.......... Schools of Blue Moki, Leatherjackets and Sweep swam around us, with several Blue Cod and Red Moki sitting looking at us inquisitively from cracks in the rocks. After 45 minutes of patrolling the area we jumped back in the boat and headed for Offal Point….

As we geared up we could see the bottom 4m below the boat, and thought, ‘oh well, at least we will be able to see the end of the gun’. The reef here runs straight out from the point onshore, like an extension of the ridge that ran up into the hills. Swimming out, the bottom was bedrock with scattered brown algae and falling away on either side to muddy sand and broken shells. We both started breathing up on the surface and my dive buddy Glen, holding the camera, about 4m to my left, was just about to dive when a small Kingfish (10-12 kg) appeared and looked quizzically at his fins reflecting the sunlight in the water. My trigger happy instincts took over and I swung the 1.4m Edge Superfrog up from my side, but as I did so my eye was caught by 4 more Yellowtails appearing from the murky water to my right.

As I swung back more Kingyes turned up and I hastily packed a last breath in and dived down towards the top of the pinnacle at 10m. Flattening out midwater and sinking slowly I looked up and saw 4 good sized tightly packed Kingfish cruise in from the left so I swung the Edge up and lined up on the bigger fish. I thought, yep that’s a nice sized fish, thinking about 15-18kg, and squeezed the trigger as they started to dive downwards off the edge of the reef. BANG!!

Gun goes off, but shaft takes a lot longer to hit the fish than I would have expected, my mind starts to doubt how fast these rubbers are shooting the spear out, never thinking for once that the fish could have been much further away and much bigger than I first thought. I look at the shooting line and it’s horizontal in the water still, and a split second later the gun flys out of my hand and I grab for the float-line as it shoots past my face.

The water off the reef was around 25-30m and my shooting line was 25m, so with line still pulling through my hands I finned like crazy out into open water away from the reef. The next 20mins was a blur but I was seriously glad of all the training I had been doing for Coast to Coast as this fish towed me up and down the coastline trying to get back towards the reef. Several times the float came close and fearing the fish was near the bottom I put as much pressure on the line as I dared and was pulled underwater. What a rush, I realised how much I’d been missing this sort of action over the past few months. Glen made a couple of dives down towards the fish but it took off as soon as he got close, he said he couldn’t see the shaft on the other side of the fish and my heart rate quickened a little again. After another 10 minutes we got a first good look at the fish and knew it was bigger than I first thought, wicked, maybe my first 20kg plus Kingfish from the Marlborough Sounds. Everytime I thought the fish was stuffed it made another big run and the gun and floatline would disappear into the murk. Finally after about 30 minutes I got hold of the shaft and let the fish pull me down slowly as I worked my way down the shaft. As I reached to grab around its tail I realised HOLY HELL my hand wouldn’t reach around there, and the Kingy wasn’t having a bar of this, tearing off with me in tow until I let go and grabbed for the floatline.

Another 5mins of stalemate and I knew he was getting stuffed, back to the gun, then the shooting line, then down the shaft. Holding one hand at the base of the shft where it went into the Kingy I went for the bear-hug, wrapping my arms and legs around the fish whilst getting the beating of a lifetime as the Kingy tried to gain its final freedom. Shoving my hand through its gills and making a fist in its mouth I knew I had him and reached for the knife to issue the final blow. As the water turned claret red I could release my death grip and see the huge size of this fish for the first real time. Not only was it longer than my gun, but was almost as round as me (OK so Im built like a Norwegian racing sardine, but this was still a big fish).

Swimming back to the anchored boat I realised how stuffed I was, and was shaking with the adrenaline. It took one person on the boat and another in the water to slide the fish onboard, and its tail still stuck out the end of the cooler bag. We bottomed out the 25 and 30kg sales, and had to use the big certified scales at the winery to way the fish a couple of hours later. 36kg!!! A gigantic fish for the South Island, and the Marlborough Sounds especially. When we opened the fish up the stomach had a large salmon in it, so it had obviously been making short work of the stray salmon from the sea-cages of the nearby salmon farm.

My biggest Kingfish ever, and as I later found out, the biggest caught during the 2008 Kingfish Cup competition. A huge thank-you to Glen for putting me on the spot and for leaving me to shoot fish while he filmed.

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As winter settles in Sydney, the patterns of the members of the North Shore Underwater Club change. As the water cools and the big fish of Summer/Autumn become scarcer, weekends away transform into weekends in Sydney – catching up with all of the people who have been neglected when the fish are “on”. That is until I spoke to the Queenslanders who know that winter time means calm weather in the Sunshine State (in theory). The perfect time to drive up to the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and get amongst the species on offer in Central Queensland.

It was during one of NSUC’s annual Pre-Xmas Bash runs up the coast that we met up with and dived

with a gun Gold Coast diver – Bryson Sheehy. Bryson only knew us through Myspace, but welcomed us into his world of diving the Tweed Coast – showing us some great spots and looking after us. Our wintertime trip would be our 6-month reunion.

The crew would be myself, Michael Takach, Bryson, and another Gold Coast spearo, Mikey. The excitement was building as Michael and I touched down at Coolangatta airport on a balmy Friday evening. Bryson picked us up from the terminal and casually mentioned (in that Queenslander way) that the weather had become less than perfect.

The collective decision was made to sit it out at Broadbeach for a night at least – not a hard decision

to make considering the night life that is available on the Gold Coast.

A close eye was kept on the weather charts for any sign of improvement in the wind – it was forecast to blow between 15 and 25 knots for a week! Over the weekend we used the time to pack the car and boat and double check we had everything. The boat and car were at capacity with the gear and luggage of four keen spearos. A quick change of the trailer wheel bearings later, we were finally on the road at Sunday lunchtime – destination Seventeen Seventy.

We arrive at night and checked into the house that Bryson had booked for us. It was a bargain and sleeps 10, so the four of us had a bedroom each.

Michael Takach - shows the rich colours of a Common (Leopard) Trout

Bryson & Michael - the superb eating Maori Rockcod

Imagine the perfect spearing 2-storey holiday house with a large lawn, balconies all around to dry your gear on, plenty of space inside to relax or to re-rig spearguns. I could barely sleep due to excitement: I knew the next day I would be spearing in warm, tropical waters while my friends in Sydney would be facing another cold day at work.

The alarm buzzing at 4:00am was inhumane. This hour redefined the meaning of “early start” for me.

An hour later we have launched the boat and cleared the heads. The forecast hasn’t improved much, 20knot SE winds forecast all day. Nevertheless, the crew make the unanimous decision to bash out to the reef. We came here to spear fish didn’t we?! It starts

Julian Chan - with a nice Mangrove Jack, a prized catch.

out OK, 1.5-2.0m seas and a bit of banging. Two and a half hours later of constant banging in an alloy boat, we finally pull into the lee side of a reef. Never again will I complain about the distance and long boat rides to the FAD – this trip redefined “KEEN”.

We travelled approximately 60 kilometres across an angry ocean to get to this reef – it better be good!

Unsurprisingly, there was not a single other boat on this reef. I slipped over the gunwale into the warm, aqua-blue water and the long boat ride was forgotten in an instant. We were diving in paradise.

On the first drift I spy a species that I’d never seen

before – Spanish Mackerel! They aren’t huge, but they are cruising by in ones and twos. Below them swim Bigeye Sea Bream, Sailfin Snapper, Venus and Black-spot Tuskfish, Spangled Emperor, Parrotfish, Wrasse and of course the grumpy Coral Trout. We explored all of the reef edges and found such varying terrain. On the outside edge I find a big Spanish Mackerel just finning in the current, waiting for his next meal to swim by. Despite knowing the Coral Sea rule of “get closer”, I make the mistake of misjudging distance in the crystal clear water. Nearby, Michael and Bryson don’t make the same mistake and pick

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