I'd Rather Be Fishin'

This weekend I was afforded the opportunity to go deep sea fishing through a work function.  There were about 20 people on the ship plus 4 crew. We departed at 7:30 am from the Hillary's Boat Harbour, which fortunately is very close to where we live.  This is the first time I've ever done anything like this, although, in grade 8 I went on a West Coast trip with school where we did a little bit of fishing.  This was significantly different.

 Here I am just after we left the harbour.  The water here is pretty flat.  At that particular moment I had no idea what to expect except that the cooler was filled with beer, the cabin filled with food and there was lots of bait on board.  You can see the fishing reel in the right of the picture.  I fished very close to this spot just out of sight to the right of the picture.   The hardest part was simply staying upright because the boat was rocking so much.  It took me some time to get my sea legs, arrrr.  We ended up using primarily squid for bait.  If you've ever handled squid you know that they are slippery and pretty gross.  My hands were covered in squid guts by the end of the trip. 

 Although you can't see it here the swell on this particular day was quite high.  At times it got to be around 10-15 feet.  That's fine except that you need two hands to hold on to the reel.  That means that you have to use all of your body muscles to keep yourself against the rail and not flailing around the ship, or worse, into the ocean.  We were fishing in 50 meters of water and as we changed spots every 30 minutes or so, we went to deeper and deeper water until we ended up at about 80 meters deep.  At our last stop we were probably 5-6 kilometers away from the city and once we could no longer see the skyscrapers in the distance I completly lost my bearings.  It took about 1 1/2 hours to get back to Perth from our further spot out.  In the picture above you can see a whole bunch of birds in the water.  This was our 4th out of 6 stops so we were very far out.  The birds are Grey Albatross and they basically followed us all day.  They were rewarded with scraps of squid and food that fell on the deck of the ship.  It was really remarkable seeing how deep some of them would diver to try to catch a little fish.

Speaking of catching fish, yes, I did.  Actually I caught three.  The first one was fairly small and not a good eating fish.  Just as I got it to the surface it got free, so that worked out well for both of us, but especially him.  The second fish wasn't so fortunate.  It felt really big shortly after I caught it but when it came up it was quite small.  Upon further inspection it had a huge gash through it's middle and it's guts were hanging out.  So, a much larger fish got a hold of it and then let go before it got to the surface.  The third fish is the one shown above.  It is normally called a Skip Jack Travalia but I called it dinner.  The crew on the boat gutted the fish but when I got it home I scaled it, skinned it, cut it, prepared it, cooked it and, of course, ate it.  I've never really been into fishing and I'm still not but this particular day was fun, although it was also exhausting.  We returned back to the harbour at about 2:30pm so all in all we were gone for about 7 hours.  Today and I pretty sore as a result.  However, there are worse ways to spend a few hours than in the sun, on the water, eating, drinking and fishing.