It was eerily calm here top of the Wessel Islands of northern Australia this morning. Not only that, it was heavily overcast again and drizzly. Not ideal for flats fishing being fish can hear and see you far before you see them.
We mixed up fishing partners again. Today I fished with Steve Fitzsimons. Steve and I go back more than ten years. We first met when he and our mutual buddy Brent Dawson signed on for my Amazon trip in 2013. We hit it off and Steve and his lady Therese have joined me on the Midnight Sun in Alaska and several times to the Seychelles including our famous cyclone disaster.
Today was my first time with guide Chris Heath. Chris lives in the Cairns area of Australia and has years of guiding experience throughout northern Australia. No matter how much experience anyone has, it was still near impossible to spot fish with our meagre light on the flats. I did my usual plucking a few odd ones from the back of the boat on a Shrimp pattern. This is my first giant herring (Elops hawaiensis). He’s basically the Australian ladyfish but is separated in this hemisphere as a different species.
It wasn’t hopeless standing in the bow searching for a permit or a blue bastard, but it was close to hopeless. Chris picked up some permit twice for Steve and even though neither Steve nor I could see them, Chris said Steve got off some good casts and that one of the permit followed his crab a few feet before veering off. And the blue bastard we saw was one Chris knew about from a few weeks ago when the Wildcard was last up here. That fish was smart and looked at Steves fly then swam to the boat to have a look at us. Chris called him George and there’s no doubt the clever bastard has been around awhile.
By lunch time it was officially our slowest day of fishing so far this week. Not only were our light conditions poor, but now the high tide was approaching and it was bringing with it murky, milky colored water. Chris suggested some coral and rock bashing to at least put a few bends in our rods. You know me, I love smacking down a Chartreuse and White Clouser where the cool fish live any day. Here’s one of my favorites, the barcheek coral trout.
We got a lot of action once we started playing around. It was fun. For the next few hours if we weren’t relaxing and sipping a beer together, we had our rods bent.
We did get a few more shots at blue bastards and a couple shots at big blackspot tuskfish. But all times we didn’t spot these fish until we were almost on top of them. By then you could see them well but it was just a tease because they were already spooked. Often when you made your cast a smaller body guard species would steal your fly. This little grouper is locally called the wire-netted reefcod (Epinephelus merra). I’m most certain this is the one in the Seychelles we call the honeycomb grouper though there are several similar and confusing to identify.
We were first back to the Wildcard this afternoon. If look at our day as a whole, Steve and I caught a lot of fish. There were several more coral trout, blue-spotted rockcod, blue tuskfish, grass tuskfish and brassy trevally to name a few. And this is another new one for my list, the black tailed sea perch, (Lutjanus lemniscutus). Sometimes you need to adjust. Sure, blue bastards and permit or a blackspot tuskfish were on this morning’s hitlist, but they weren’t available. We tweaked things and had a blast.
It was an overall difficult day of fishing for everyone. The super high tide with the milky colored water in the afternoon was the dagger. Everyone did about the same as Steve and I. Mike Lodge landed the only glamor species; he got this nice blackspot tuskie.
We ended our day with a bang however. Tonight was beach night. Instead of our usual dinner on the Wildcard, they hauled us to a nearby beach. The staff lit a fire and fed us another amazing dinner.
After our feast as we sat around the fire, I broke out my sharpies. I almost always whip out a few fish for the guides and staff no matter where I am in the world. Tonight I did an Indo-Pacific permit on Capt. Tom’s backpack and a barramundi for May on a cool shell she found.
The boat is moving again tonight. Apparently, there are storms moving towards the upper Wessel Islands tonight and we are going to try and get far enough south to avoid them. We’re headed for what they call the cut which is where if the wind is right, we can do some fishing on the east side of the island chain.