The Old Masters — Hilary Burden

Max Hall and Mike Gray are ready to go. The Old Masters

Some fishing masters are either born, or get away from it all, on Great Oyster Bay. Hilary Burden meets three of Swansea’s legendary ‘ancient mariners’

What old people don’t know, those who’ve lived 80 summers or more. You wonder about a sixth sense. But famed 20th century Tasmanian-born ‘prince of navigators’ Harold Gatty, would have none of that. He reckoned some people, especially those born before modern methods of navigation, are just better at tuning into the natural things happening around them.

In his classic book Finding Your Way Without A Map or Compass, Gatty called it “natural navigation”. The kind of navigation you won’t find in a textbook, it’s the ability to observe, to see little things that may seem trivial. A keen sense of observation in the outside world adds up, improving with age – like vintage wine.

Great Oyster Bay offers shelter and protection of the maritime kind, nestled between the pink granite cliffs of Freycinet and Schouten Island, and the east coast’s frequently placid coves, beaches and bays that run down to Little Swanport, with Nine Mile Beach connecting the two sides at the Swan River mouth.

The whole bay – roughly 20 kms in all directions, to a depth of 13m – is sand, long known for being one of the best places to fish for flathead; and the Swan River, for bream.

Swansea’s ancient mariners sit and watch the weather on the water from their front rooms.

Max Hall, 88 in August, has a view of the whole bay – 50 kms south to Maria and about the same north to Bicheno. While his livelihood was formerly made on the roads, running the east coast freight then bus services, he knows the trip across the bay from Swansea to Schouten to Coles Bay and back is a triangle, roughly equi-distant. With that, you can tell the size of the bay, and where you are in it.

Max moved here with his Swansea born wife, Helen (née Cook), in the 1950s. He says you’re a pretty poor fisher if you can’t go out and get a feed of flathead from the bay. He remembers fishing for cray on the reef with Helen’s father, when the crays had coral on their backs.

If he’s on his own Max goes out in a smaller boat from the Swansea boat ramp, or else he’s in the Expo. Mainly in the morning when it’s calm enough and warm enough, never in an easterly. He knows the weather by heart. “You don’t get many in the afternoons, not when it’s blowing because you are moving too fast and you can’t keep your line on the bottom. In summertime you get the nor’easters after lunch, so it’s not much chop.”

You won’t find him checking his mobile for the weather. Instead, Max takes his cue from the old weather glass he won playing footie for Swansea. Best and fairest. If it sits on 30 or above, it’s pretty fine. “If the glass drops back, she’s coming off the land, so watch out! Off the land is a westerly, and they’re blowing out to sea, and if you miss Schouten Island you’re buggered! Next stop is New Zealand. We learned the hard way. If you made a blue you had to put up with it. Most people who look at Willy Weather don’t learn for themselves.”

Round the back of Schouten Island there are some beautiful fish, he says. “But it’s hard to get ‘round there when there’s no roll or slop, or no wind. You don’t get many chances at doing that.”

He catches them on a bit of meat or chop, or he’ll use squid cut up into little squares. He’ll have a hook on one end, then a sinker, then a lure, then another hook, “so when they get there, they think it’s a smorgasboard”.

Max says some people just fish with lures and no bait at all, just drag it along the bottom. “Flathead’ll chase, if they’re there and they’re hungry, they’ll grab anything.” He caught his first flathead in the bay 70 years ago in Helen’s Uncle Perce’s old dinghy. Just as well you didn’t have to go out far for flathead in those days because once Max put a hole in the dinghy just giving it a lick of paint. “It had a little mast in the boat, and we used to take a blanket with us so when it blew southerly you could sail home. The only way you could steer it was to tie a paddle on the back and use that as a tiller.” When Perce told him he’d got an outboard it turned out to be a new set of paddles.

Max’ll tell you there’s no season for flathead, that you can catch them all year round. In the winter it’s harder because there’s no small feed in the bay. “When the small feed comes in the bay, when you see the birds diving and carrying on, the flathead get excited and start feeding off the small spoils left by sea birds diving for salmon. “When they catch ‘em they chop it up and the flathead feed on the leftovers. That’s how it works. In the wintertime you don’t see any of that because the birds aren’t there.”

“Around the beach the flathead are mostly bigger. They like it round there because they catch a lot of crabs from Nine Mile Beach. Like us, they have a diet. But you’ve got to be able to fish there when there’s no roll at all because the flathead can’t breathe properly when the water’s all stirred up so they make out to the deeper water. When the roll has quietened down for two or three days, they’ll head back.”

Max knows when the roll’s on because he sees the surfies turn up at the point break at Waterloo Point. And when you see the surfies, you don’t go fishing round the beach. That’s when you’ll find Max in the river fishing for bream. “The weather don’t matter too much when you’re on the river.” He says it’s the best bream fishing in Australia, but the river is tricky. “The best time to go up is at low tide, you know where all the mudbanks are.” The Old Swansea locals will tell you there’s few better at fishing for bream in the Swan River than Max Hall.

How do you like your flathead? I fillet them off so there’s no bone at all. Usually I put them in a plastic bag with a bit of flour. Put a little bit of oil in the pan, not a lot, then just brown them on both sides.

Mike Gray is an Eastcoaster, originally from Rheban, who’s lived in Swansea for nearly 50 of his 80 years. His farm on the riverbank overlooks the Swan River boat ramp, the old hand-dug, 1.5 km cut across Kings Bay, Moulting Lagoon and Freycinet on the horizon. He’s never far from farm or fish. From the age of 14 he’s free dived for scallops, crays and abalone when you didn’t have to work for it. He knows you never fish for bream in the river when the nor’easter is blowing. And that the bream turn brown and taste of mud in winter, how they’re not worth eating until a good rain comes and cleans out the river and they’re good and silvery again. He knows the flounder used to be good near the Swan River mouth at Pelican Point, and that trout – sea runners – used to come up a bit in spawning season when the locals would troll up and down.

All good reasons why Swansea held the Tasmanian Bream Fishing Championships every November. For years, people used to travel from all over the place, camping in paddocks along the river. Mike’s glad that era has ended: “You’d see people come in and dump garbage cans of fish at the tip. They’d only want to take away the biggest”. Locals used to moor their boats down here, too, when boating picnics were popular and everybody in Swansea had a boat, raced dinghies, and kids learnt to water ski on the Swan. But the modern world with its’ different pasttimes and pilfering put a stop to that. Mike first learned to fish in the Browns River, visiting his grandmother in Kingston. “An old retired bloke there took a shine to us and took us fishing for bream. In those days we had the old gut line, the white one. He’d put it in a mug of tea first, so it’d go brown and not show up.”

Mike loves best the days when he used to take a little 8-footer plywood dinghy, slip down off the point in Swansea and go out, “with me, the oars and a fishing rod”. Later, he’d take the family in their Bertram 20 over to Bryans Corner, where the water was so clear you could see the flathead coming up two at a time. “We got sick of that, so we took a hook off. Two at a time are a damn nuisance.”

These days, his boat is a Quintex Ocean Sport, 6.3m with two motors. He jokes how Max Hall is his weather forecast. Maybe it’s not such a joke. “Willy weather doesn’t catch fish. If there are any fish around somewhere Max’ll be there. If they’re getting them around the sands, Nine Mile Beach, that’s quick so we’ll slip around there first, if there’s nothing there, then we’ll head across below the oyster leases in the bay. We’ve got a couple of spots there, and then head down the passage if we hadn’t done any good, and stay this side of the passage, to Black Reef. When we get really adventurous, we might go out through the Hen and Chickens (Rocks) and look for stripeys.”

He says the fishing’s not like it used to be. The main pressure comes from flathead fishers. “A lot of em do the right thing but a lot of ‘em don’t.”

You’ll still see Mike go out when the weather is warm. And on Saturday morning’s they’ll be swapping fishy stories at the Swansea RSL. Have you heard the saying, “You can’t catch fish on a shirt tail?” asks Mike. “We used to though. If we forgot the bait, we’d cut a bit off the shirt bottom and stick it on a hook.”

How do you like your flathead? They’re the nicest fish fresh. Just whip the two fillets off, it’s a bit wasteful but you don’t have to mess about with bones. A bit of flour, just straight in the pan, a bit of oil on the bottom and then butter. A bit of white wine – as you finish it off on the other side, just drizzle it across – or lemon juice, always have lemon juice. When they’re a day or two old, you do the flour, egg, and breadcrumbs. Max Hall on his front veranda overlooking Great Oyster Bay with a bird’s eye view of Schouten Passage.

Mike Gray with his view above Swan River boat ramp, across Moulting Lagoon to the Hazards.

Terry Charlton is 92 this year and while he says his age is coming into it, he still goes out with friends fishing when the weather suits him, never when it’s cold. Come the first Saturday in August when the trout season opens, he’ll go up to Lake Leake, half an hour’s drive away, where he keeps a dinghy, has a beer or two at the pub, and checks-up his mate’s shack. He’s not so interested in saltwater fishing these days but keeps his eye on the weather from his front deck, and on his regular 630am daily walk around the blocks of Swansea.

In the bay his favourite place to fish is off the reef for cod, 3 to 4 kms out, or else further towards The Hazards in 15m of water, “where we think we get the best flathead, but you catch fish all over the bay. You can’t say just fish in one spot because that’s ridiculous … put in the time anywhere and you’ll catch fish, I believe. There’s a certain bunch of pine trees that seems to be a good place to head for. If they don’t have any luck there, they go somewhere else. But fishing in the bay isn’t that good at the moment – there are stacks of little fish.”

Older Tasmanians know Terry from the Terry Charlton Sports Store in Launceston which he owned from 1965-1995. Before that, in 1956, Terry was named Australian Fly Casting Champion, and had a mention in the Guinness Book of Records for distance. Named as one of Australia’s casting ‘Champion of Champions’, Terry Charlton made his start making and selling flies for thruppence and sixpence each. He says he learnt all he knows about fishing from fly casting, his first love. “You must be able to cast before you catch a fish.”

He caught the knack from the best – a friend of his fathers by the name of Dick Wigram, a renowned Tasmanian fisherman who also owned a popular fishing shop in Launceston in the late 1940s.

“Dick said to come out to Corra Linn and have a cast,” recalls Terry. “I just watched him for a while, then he gave me a rod and said to have a go with that. Within weeks I was among the winners. I just had the knack. I never had a lesson, just watched Dick’s method, his timing, his style, copied it and added some of my own, and it worked. I was Christmas on a stick at one stage.” He wears the pain to prove it, suffering arthritis in his right wrist he puts down to fly casting.

There’s not many places Terry hasn’t fished in Tasmania. He fished with his father, and with his late wife Josie. He took Stirrah, the 40ft boat he built and kept on the Tamar at Exeter, to Cairns and back. He fished at Lake King William on the weekends. Terry was there at the beginning of the Corra Linn Fly Fishing and Casting Club. He passed on his many silver trophies a long time ago – many are held by the Fly Fishing Museum at Clarendon. He once specialized in repairing anything in the way of reels or rods. A gifted craftsman, he still makes things with his hands – boat models are a passion. And he even ‘reinvented the wheel’ – designing a fishing reel out of plywood, shaped the size of a side plate to make the reeling in less frenzied.

It’s easy to forget Terry is in his 90s, he’s so active, but he says it’s the first time in his life he’s never had much to do with boats. Terry started and ran the original Swansea Coastguard for a decade, looking after other boats in the bay. These days the dinghy up at Lake Leake suits him for the fishing he needs to do. “I can be damned if I catch a fish or not really. If I get one on it’s a great day. The number of fish is no longer of any importance at all. Gee whizz we’ve had a lot of beautiful fishing, though, there’s no doubt about that.”

At 92 years old Terry Charlton is still very active. How do you like your flathead? There are no better fish than flathead, especially off the barbecue. Roll them in cornflour – simple. I also like flathead fillets cut into cubes, then submerged in white vinegar with a little port wine for a couple of hours, or overnight. They’re very tasty, and there’s no cooking at all. Hilary Burden