April 2005

PO Box 63 KALBARRI WA 6536 PH/FAX (08) 9937 2043
http://www.murchisonboathire.com.au/

MURCHISON BOAT HIRE APRIL 2005 NEWSLETTER
The school holidays in the middle of this month were very busy for all the boats. The second week was a bit slower boat wise but the weather was awesome. Calm days for the whole week and good bottom fishing but a disappointing lack of mackerel. The swell came up a bit and turned the water a bit cloudy sending the macs away.

But prior to the school holidays it was full on. Local, Peter Dooley, had his brother Paul visiting from England this month and both being keen anglers took the 6.1m out midweek and luckily picked the best day of the week. The mackerel were going ballistic, hitting anything presented to them. Paul took the first hit and dropped it at the boat! A bit of disappointment but that did not last long as within 5 minutes they had another hook-up and Paul got his first mac. A bit bigger than the lake carp he is used to catching! They ended up with 2 macs each and then released 3 more before returning to the boat ramp at 10.30am!

Peter and Paul Dooley, had their bag limit by 10.30am!

The hot new Halco lure colour, “King Brown” has proven itself. Over Easter we were fishing Halco 190 Laser Pro DDs in 4 different lure colours plus a gardie way out the back, and it was the “King Brown” colour that took all the hits, and I mean, all the hits! The only time other lures caught was when we had a double hook-up after the “King Brown had been snapped up! Consider it when buying lures for a mackerel-fishing trip.
The damage that the new colour “King Brown” did over Easter (bag limits of mackerel)
The lure that is making an impact! Halco Laser Pro 190DD colour no. 70 King Brown

Derek, wife Bertrix, and kids were up this month but with his own boat! He had hired one of our dinghies a couple of years back and had a great time. Since then has bought his own boat and popped in for some advice. The bow rider he bought is fine for the Swan River and estuaries but a bit wet for Kalbarri. He could not get out often and very far and was not doing very well. He did however break his mackerel drought, getting a small one in the river mouth and some nice sized mulloway not far from the entrance!
He was here for 2 weeks and during one of the rare days when the weather was good and the 6.1 was not booked I invited him out to try some spots I had marked during the “Classic”.
We got a dhuie each and bag limits of red-throat emperor and Derek a nice baldie as well. Derek is now considering the expensive changeover to a bigger boat!

Derek’s dhuie and baldie

Colin Willis, Andrew Hall, Jeff Bradbury and Gil Carter, spent three days in the blue on the 6.1m. They arrived just after the swell had picked up; water turned cold with seaweed everywhere. Not too good for fishing. They did catch a few fish but not as many and as big as last year with the boat but sure made up for it catching 7 big mulloway up to 20kgs at Frustration after the 3-day hire. The shark pic below was one of the fish Jeff got into.
The +-5 foot sandbar or northern whaler shark took a bottom rig and fought like a sambo, with long and (Unusual for a shark) fast runs. An extremely hard fighter and after a few pics released itself.

The following email received from Paull Webber explains his experience over a 3-day hire in the middle of April. I have copied the following straight from his email!

From: "Paull Weber"
To: Laurie Malton
Subject: Re: fish pics
Date: 26 April, 2005 12:11 AM

Yes Laurie
First I would like to start with a testimonial of sorts...please indulge me. Print what you like, I just did want to do more than simply email you some pics, we enjoyed the hire far more than that.
I have spent 40 years since I was two years old enjoying fishing in various forms and have had reasonable success after spending the normal periods of apprenticeship in any new fishing style or location, we have owned big boats in the past but never got a good return on our investment of time or money and sold up many years ago, opting instead to get back into car toppers and go off-road in search of good fish in more isolated locations. We do well at this type of fishing, but places like Kalbarri were just too hard for a small dinghy fisho to get out onto the water, we have done it but the river mouth does get hairy in an 11foot car topper! So, as much as we love Kalbarri as a family holiday destination we tended to head further north to Coral Bay or the Peron Peninsula where better dinghy fishing is available...we catch some great fish...but oh what a long drive!. Instead of fuel in the boat we put fuel in the Patrol!

For a while we thought charter boats might offer the solution, but, apart from an excellent operator in Coral Bay (Simon) I have become quite disillusioned with charter boat operators who are (in my experience) on the whole more intent on getting back on time and keeping the boat clean than ensuring their customers get into good fish.
The number of times I have cast an eye over a colour sounder that is on sand bottom and been told that we were over "good country" because they botched up the anchoring and can't be bothered shifting, assuming I know nothing about the art of sounder reading is beyond reproach. Head charters are definitely not for previous boat owners with any ability, you find yourself wanting to grab the wheel too often!

So...we re-evaluated our holiday fishing plans and decided to hire one of your larger boats to get back in control of the decision making so that we could not blame others for a lack of fish, returning to Kalbarri for a much more relaxed week of fishing and I must say it feels like I should have figured it out years ago! Save on the nasty capital and maintenance costs of owning a big boat, the fuel and time costs of towing a boat and the aggravation cost of skippers of charter "fishing" ventures. Well it sounds so obvious now...we are converts!

From what I have seen on the sounder in three short days Kalbarri has heaps of fishable water close to shore (I think it's nice when you are new to an area to keep in sight of land) for a fair distance either side of the river mouth that it will always turn up some good fish for the patient angler who gets half decent weather, and in your excellent 6.1 metre boat even average conditions are no obstacle.

The first day saw me punching the bow into a 15-20 knot southerly and heading only 6 miles or so south, being a bit concerned about my 69 year old novice (to boat fishing) father-in-law's ability to handle the anchor in such conditions...but it was a breeze (pardon the pun). Lucky for us we bagged out on the first spot we tried (and the anchor held), catching a small pinkie and a heap of sand snapper between 4 and 8 kg that were great fun and not bad on the chew for fishos used to a feed of Rockingham herring either! We were quickly into "catch and release" mode and headed back in through the river mouth by 1pm happy as pigs in mud (probably smelled similar) and only worried about how day two could get any better!
The first big bonus...your 6.1 is more economical than my Patrol! I could not believe the fuel economy we got from that Yamaha 115...I topped up the tanks that first night and it cost $24 at country fuel prices!...are you sure it's not nuclear powered? Maybe I should tow the Patrol on a barge behind a 4 stroke outboard up the coast when I next go away?

Day two saw a strong easterly at daybreak keeping us close to the cliffs around Shell House and once again the same area as day one turned up trumps with two nice Baldchins of about 4kg that were great fun on my light flick stick. The light braid I had on this reel certainly made the difference, as Peter remained virtually fishless on a day when everything bit very softly and the bites were largely not felt on mono. The rest of the day was a case of one or two fish from each spot and we slowly learned that the boats GPS marks were great for getting new anglers to an area onto good ground but then it was best to sound around the general area and look for something new rather than hammer the same old marks. We found one spot in about 25 metres late in the day where we both took fish in quick order, it was full of nice bar-cheeked emperor schooling up, they were legal size fish, not big but fun and good eating too. We left the waypoint (somewhere between 115 & 119 from memory) in the sounder so that we too could add to the collective knowledge of the boat…I think that the more spots on the plotter the less likely any one is going to get overfished, so I hope others who hire the boat share this view.
Paull with his baldies, note Red Bluff in the background!
Day three, the biggest problem was my crew of one who had run out of arm strength for anchoring and fish pulling! So we took it easy and the weather glassed off to help us out for an hour and then a nice gentle southerly of 10 knots all afternoon obliged to again allow us to get a nice mixed bag –including another baldie- geeze those fish can fight! Just to prove we are relative newbies to fishing this coast, on the way home I decided to fish a massive fish “lump” out from Red Bluff that I had noticed on the way out…getting so excited by the size of the schools on this “lump” that I pinged the spot, about 200 metres long and rising 4 metres from the sea bed, perhaps it was a wreck? As it turned out the “lump” was a fish school so big, dense and bottom hugging that I mistook the fish for bottom structure at first. Even better, maybe it was the mother load of pink snapper…. drop down wait…nothing…. wind up nothing… IE NO HOOKS…. bloody great humongous school of northwest blowies…definitely time to go home and pray that that school never moves closer into the cliffs or we can all take up golf!

Cleaned the boat out on the way back and finished off the hire by taking my daughter for a cruise up the river for 15 minutes, something that would be far less impressive for a 10 year old Emma in our dingy. Now… three days left to spend with my family a good feed of fish in the freezer and Laurie gets the boat back to sort out any problems while I play putt-putt and soak up the sun, yep this is the way to go, some of the best holiday dollars I have ever spent! Just like Arnie …I will be back.

One final important point…our hire boat owners Laurie and Sue understand what is important for fishos, an honest appraisal of the weather, an honest discussion of the fishing potential of the area for the time of year and water conditions (too cold for mackerel the week we were there) and a genuine desire to help connect you to a fish.

No doubt Laurie would consider our Sand Snapper as catch and release or “neighbour fish” if he was on the water, I could see the glint in his eye when he was congratulating us…one mans poison is another’s pleasure! But he was also obviously pleased as punch to see that we enjoyed the experience and I got the real impression that for once a fishing host really did want us to catch fish. He even made the effort at the end of day one to drop round at our holiday lodgings to give us an updated 4 day weather forecast, something that made our wives feel much better about letting us go out… as in most things in life it is the small things that matter…thanks Laurie for the first of many enjoyable trips I am sure.

Thanks for the great time!

Paull Weber & Peter Roach

Paull Weber (Mcom)
Doctoral Researcher
and Unit Controller Small Business 200
Curtin University of Technology
Bentley, Western Australia
Postal: GPO BOX U1987
Western Australia, Postcode 6845
Mobile 0427593687
Fax +61 8 92667694
email paull.weber@cbs.curtin.edu.au


Laurie