Cape Snapshots – By Dave Donald
I’ve just relocated from Cape York Peninsula after spending more than half my adult lifetime as a resident. It’s been a bittersweet occasion but I’m sure that my passion for the place will always stay with me. Once the Cape gets in your blood, it’s there forever!
As many regular readers will be aware, the majority of my 35 year journey was spent as a professional fishing and adventure guide. In spite of the glamorous image often depicted in the media, the life of a marine charter operator is no 35hour week junket with fishing thrown in. There are plenty of starters for this ‘profession’ but few survive long term – I’ve seen dozens come and go during my sojourn. Forget 35 hour weeks with lunch and coffee breaks, 70 hours plus are usual, days off during the fishing season as few as a couple per month. It’s a long, hard grind that doesn’t pay well and very physically and mentally demanding.
Blue salmon like this one landed by Fisheries manager Dan Smith, was the first species landed by the author when he initially visited the northern Cape in the company of the state’s first professional tropical guide, Gary Wright.
But there’s an upside, particularly when you are based in remote, lightly fished locations. As I’m prone to surmise – I may not be the wealthiest bloke around, but the places I’ve seen and the experiences I’ve had in the natural realm have made me a millionaire many times over! It all boils down to what you want from life and I’m humbled to say that my lifestyle has been the envy of many. The self-satisfaction that comes from living your passion will trump heaps of dollars every time, a realisation that becomes very apparent when you reach your latter years.
The question then becomes how do you condense three decades where no two days are ever the same into a 1500 word column? Impossible, of course, but there may be a book in the pipeline – if I ever get time to sit down and finish it! Meanwhile, let’s pull a few snapshots from the neural archives of my thousands of Cape adventures.
One person more than any other was responsible for my moving to the Cape, the enigmatic sportfishing pioneer, Gary Wright. Gary was established as the in-house guide at the Cape York Wilderness Lodge when I arrived to write a story on the place for Fishing World magazine in 1987. The first spot we visited was the mouth of the Jardine River, where wet season runoff was pushing a strip of dirty water about 5 metres wide along the beach edge as the tide ebbed.
Solid jacks like this one can be found in salt and fresh water locations all over the Cape. Dan Terry scored this solid specimen in the upper reaches of Weipa’s Embley River.
“There’ll be barra sitting in the dirty water’, Gary predicted as he handed me a fly rod. I cast about 10 m but the fly never made the discoloured water as a hefty blue salmon grabbed it before I could strip it that far. After releasing that fish, I roll cast the fly to the edge of the dark water and my first Jardine barra jumped on. For something like an hour and a half, it was a fish a cast, long if you wanted a salmon or Queenfish, close for a pink eyes! Welcome to paradise, Cape style.
Two years later, I purchased Gary’s business at the Lodge and for the second time in my career became a full-time charter operator. In those days, I had the Jackey Jackey and Jardine River systems pretty much all to myself, working the Jardine from March until July, then switching to the east coast mangrove forest for the remainder of the year. During the run out tides, the Jardine mouth was full of Queenfish averaging 10 to 12 kilos and more than the occasional 20kg plus GT. At that time of year, the tannin stained water was drinkable at half tide down, even producing a 15kg Spanish mackerel during one memorable popper tossing session.
Jackey Jackey Creek was just as remarkable, to the extent that we never encountered any undersized barramundi during my first two seasons! All that changed when a commercial barramundi net boat turned up in the estuary one day and stayed for 3 months with the result that our average size dropped and undersized barra began to appear in catches. Entangled fish laying in mud in the midday heat while eagles picked out their eyes became a disturbing sight but it seems these fish were still good enough to freeze and fillet. Perhaps that’s the reason I’m loath to this day to eat commercially caught barra!
Bill Watson was given a real work out by this brassy trevally wide of Duyfken Point, at the northern end of Albatross Bay. This species was once prolific in that area when the author set up business there in 1997. Sadly, numbers are now greatly reduced.
Family issues and a push by the Labor Goss government to declare half of the Cape as World Heritage Listed saw me sell my business to the lessees of Punsand Bay Private Reserve where I’d been very happily ensconced since leaving the Lodge after the local Injinoo community took control. That’s another story in itself! But by then, I’d started to notice a downward trend in the size and number of certain fish stocks, particularly Queenfish, black jewfish and barra, which incidentally coincided with increased commercial fishing pressure.
After all that time in the ‘bush’, even Cairns was too busy for my new lifestyle, so it wasn’t long before I was looking for another Cape York base. After the logistical difficulties of working out of Punsand Bay, the mining town of Weipa looked like heaven on a stick, with huge estuaries, fuel and servicing services, accommodation and even its own airport. What’s more, we could buy our own house while our growing daughter attended a regular school.
Dave Newman was the only fishing guide in the town at that stage and he consented to giving me a tour of some of the expansive rivers, as did Gavin Wust, a Weipa resident and long-time mate who I’d known since he was a young lad. Within 3 months of visiting the place, I was back with a new boat and a fairly busy booking calendar.
Fishing attitudes towards using a professional guide were changing quickly at that time. Barely 5 years before, the mindset had been “I’m not paying all that money for someone to take me fishing! It’s daylight robbery, I can do it myself.” Thanks to the fishing media, to which I was contributing articles regularly, travelling fishers were cottoning on to the value for money aspect of hiring an experienced professional. The sector was not without its ‘cowboys’ however as smarties attempted to capitalize on what they saw as a great way to get paid to go fishing. Quite a few times over the years, I had calls from fishers who had been ripped off by shonks who ‘disappeared’ or went bust at the last minute.
My first season in Weipa saw fishing so prolific that I was left pinching myself on many occasions. When I attempted to publish fishing reports, I received comments from several persons that I was exaggerating or dreaming! It got to the stage that I would underestimate our catches to present a more acceptable report. My chosen vessel was far removed from the average guide boat today – a 5.5m Yamaha longboat powered by a tiller steered 55HP motor! These days, the average Weipa charter boat has 150 to 200 horses on the transom!
Albatross Bay in 1997 was a totally different environment to that of 2024. I rarely ventured more than 25NM south of the Embley River mouth but the fishing was exceptional right along the coastline. From barra, Queenies and salmon along the beaches to tuna, trevally, larger Queenfish, cobia and mackerel offshore, there was usually action aplenty, particularly towards the Red Cliffs and Boyd Bay.
Arguably a species that qualifies as the ‘perfect’ sport fish, the Queenfish remains a firm favourite with fishers regardless of the tackle used. The author with an average Cape specimen.
Manta rays patrolled the beaches for a couple of months at the end of the wet feeding on jelly prawn aggregations. They were almost always accompanied by cobia and golden trevally schools. Boyd Bay was full of Queenfish, mackerel and schools of pick handle barracuda while pods of cobia, tuna and big giant trevally often stalked the anchored boats. The pelagic fish regularly rounded up schools of bait forming tightly packed bait balls marked by circling frigate birds, gulls and boobies. Some of the best offshore fishing I’ve ever experienced happened in those early years from 1997 to 2003 with clients often being fished to exhaustion and daily lure losses per person often in double figures.
Longtail tuna would generally start arriving from the south in March and April and by May, the Bay would be dotted with large schools of feeding fish. Some would even move into the Embley River mouth and could occasionally be hooked from the Evans Landing jetty. The schools would start to thin out come September as they appeared to move north but landing a longtail for sashimi was almost guaranteed on most days into late November.
Sadly, the sensational fishing of the late 90’s and early naughties is now only a memory. Commercial net fishing offshore has decimated fish stocks and many of the megafauna species. Longtail tuna are now so scarce that they are an occasional capture inshore, the immense numbers of those early days merely a memory that I recorded in daily personal log sheets from 1997 to 2009. But Fisheries have never been interested in data that clearly shows their management incompetence!
So that’s my first instalment in what may become a series! I’ll have to follow that thought up with editor Ant – who actually lived in Weipa during the good times!
