We decided to go up the coast to our friends house an hour north of Perth, just a sleepy little fishing town. We had a quiet new years eve in anticipation of fishing the next day.
Our friends house sleeps so many people, there were about 12 and 6 kids. We saw midnight and went to bed about 10 minutes later.
Jono and I woke up to get an early start to our fishing trip. We were taking his boat out and one of our friends was going out with a neighbors boat.
They have the sweetest neighbors, but the man has just gotten too old to put his boat in and out without help. He also doesn't like being on the water alone. So he only goes fishing when Jono is there to take his boat out.
It's quite an operation, and the beach launch does not always go smoothly. If you remember last year a wave crashed over the boat as I was getting out, resulting in a split eyebrow!
This time I got swamped by a wave as the boat was going in, but I managed to jump in the boat. In deeper water I took a swim to shake the sand off.
We headed out maybe 12 kms to start fishing. It took about an hour and Jono caught a massive Western Australia dhufish, these are protected and have a limit of 2 per boar. His fish was 15.5kg and covered the entire bottom of the ice chest.
We kept fishing and I had resigned myself to not catching anything. It was slow fishing. Finally I pulled up a blue chin grouper. Still I had pretty much given up all hope of ever catching a fish as large as Jono's.
We were talking about pulling up and going farther out when WAMMMOOOO! Line was being taken like I'd never seen except on TV. I kept tension on the rod, but was pretty certain I had a shark on. After the first run, I had gained ground on it, until it saw the boat and took off again! Total this mystery of the deep made 4 runs on me.
I was fishing with pretty light gear for out that far (10-15kg). So we thought it would probably be a fish or shark around 15kg, because the rod was handling it so well!
As I kept reeling using an up and down motion to gain ground. We finally saw color. It was a fish! What kind! A Western Australia dhufish! And a massive one.
Average dhufish come around 6-10kg, a big one is 15-18kg, and the record is 25kg. Before the species was protected it was dramatically overfished. So the ancient 18kg+ monsters are very few and far between. But damn my lucky stars if I didn't catch a 20.5kg beast!! That is 45lbs!!
Jono has been fishing WA his entire life, and has only seen one bigger than mine. Hot diggity dog! As soon as I saw that baby surface I was doing a happy dance, screaming, frolicking, mocking Jono "mines bigger than yours, mines bigger than yours!". I was having a party. We didn't weigh it until shore, but when it didn't fit in the ice chest that is a meter long, and it was taking up a majority of the floor space in the boat... I knew I had a monster.
It was and probably will be the biggest fish I ever caught. I'm thrilled with it! Plus to buy this fish in stores it is $80/kg my fish was worth over a thousand bucks!! When you put all the filets from both of our duh together, it was an absolute mountain of filets!
So take that 2013! This year is my year!!
Love you all!
Xx
Tori
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