From a distance, we may still look like two idiots dangling lines into water where nothing is biting. I can live with that assessment, especially if it leaves us free to continue for another drift. Julian is beside me, there is no shortage of water, and sooner or later one of us will have something to say. With any luck, it will be me announcing a fish.
The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For
There are times when fishing must look like a fairly questionable use of a day. Two blokes sit in a boat, dangling lines into water that has given no indication of containing anything interested in them, and continue doing so long after the available evidence suggests they should reconsider. From the shore, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a pair of idiots. From inside the boat, particularly when the other idiot is my son Julian, there can be very little wrong with the arrangement.
We do like to catch fish, of course. I would struggle to explain the rods, the tackle and the considerable attention given to finding somewhere promising if I claimed otherwise. Julian is also unlikely to allow a successful capture to pass without establishing its significance in relation to anything I have managed, and I reserve the same privilege. But the hours between those incidents have a value that is difficult to put in a photograph, especially when the photograph would show two largely motionless men and an equally untroubled body of water.
With Julian, we can go hours without saying much at all. There is no particular difficulty to be resolved in that silence, no obligation to keep checking whether the other person is enjoying himself. Then a strike, a missed fish or some evidence of questionable competence will get us going again, and a conversation that begins with what happened to a hook can wander somewhere else entirely. We have time to follow it, which is often the thing missing when we talk elsewhere.
One February weekend on Wallis Lake provided a reasonably complete demonstration of our relationship with fishing, including the ease with which the rules of a competition can become clearer after somebody starts winning. Julian had come up for the weekend, arriving on the Friday evening to find the sea looking almost inviting. There was little swell and the water was like glass, conditions that mattered because he suffers badly from seasickness and vertigo. Heading outside is seldom much of an option unless the ocean is behaving itself.
By morning, it had changed its mind. Rain had belted down overnight and a southerly was howling, leaving us to consider the difference between what we had hoped to do and what might actually be possible. Fishing the opening at Smiths Lake would put us casting into the wind, while another option required bait we did not have. A visit from your son does not become any longer because the weather is inconvenient, so we kept looking for a way to use the day.
Eventually, with the rain stopped and the wind easing a little, we hooked up the boat and headed for the Rec Club ramp. Dodger had been catching flathead on the Camp Elim drifts while Robyn and I were away travelling, and his reports had been encouraging enough to become mildly irritating. There is a particular motivational quality to another fisherman’s success when he has made sure you know about it. Naturally, we were interested in checking his information.
His directions had the usual fisherman’s precision, which can leave considerable room between knowing roughly where the fish were caught and being able to put a lure in front of one. He had also been fishing in calm conditions or a slight north-easterly. We had a southerly still blowing around twenty knots, and water he had described as a metre or two deep became shallow enough for the motor to find the bottom. We were discovering the place under rather different arrangements.
We worked our lures through the water, lifting them from the bottom and letting them settle again, trying to suggest an easy meal. The weed showed plenty of interest. It could put enough weight on the line to encourage a brief and entirely unjustified optimism, after which we would retrieve another specimen and resume the search for something with a less botanical background. Julian had recently renewed his fishing licence and was keen to obtain something more convincing for his money.
Then his weed began behaving like a fish. The rod and line were doing things the wind and drift could no longer explain, and I put down my own rod to get the net. He had the drag set lightly and was enjoying the contest, allowing the flathead its attempts to escape before bringing it within reach. For a while, everything else in the boat became secondary to getting that fish aboard.
Once netted, it offered a further contribution to the entertainment. The hook fell out and the flathead began flapping around the bottom of the boat among our bare feet, which gave us something more immediate to think about than our technique. Julian eventually secured it with the fish grippers, and we could move on to measuring, photographing and establishing that he was one ahead. The Hooligan, as he is known in these fishing proceedings, had opened his account.
A second flathead followed, giving him a lead he was perfectly capable of explaining without assistance. I eventually caught a whiting after changing my soft plastic, then a bream on a hard-bodied lure, which brought us level on numbers. Another legal bream put me ahead, three fish to two. This seemed a satisfactory outcome until Julian drew attention to the fact that we had set out to catch flathead.
On that measure, I had achieved nothing at all. My numerical victory was therefore subject to a qualification that happened to favour the person making it, although I could hardly deny his fish were the ones we had come looking for. We went home with a catch, a result open to interpretation and enough material to keep the discussion alive well beyond the ramp. It had been a full day out of a morning that initially looked unlikely to offer us much.
There was a further detail that put the whole business into perspective. Julian did not like eating fish, so while Robyn had whiting fillets and I ate flathead, he had a steak she had prepared for him. The bloke making the strongest claim to having fulfilled the purpose of the expedition had no intention of eating its principal achievement. He had come fishing, and that was quite enough.
The following morning, 20 February 2022, we went back. The wind had dropped away and the early sun was coming over the trees on the eastern side of the lake, making light against the structures standing out of the water. I tried to photograph it, with the movement of the boat and the light making the job less straightforward than simply noticing how good it looked. We could work the shallows more deliberately now, without being driven towards them at the previous day’s pace.
Julian caught a flathead of forty-six centimetres, again making use of a lightly set drag to give the encounter its full duration. I netted it, which was becoming my principal contribution to the catching side of the operation. Between fish, there was ribbon weed to remove from the lures and sufficient opportunity to compare the size of these useless captures. We could apparently make a competition out of vegetation if the fish left us unattended for long enough.
He caught another flathead, then a third after I moved us towards a line of crab pots. My attempts to improve my own prospects were working extremely well for him, and he was not burdened by any reluctance to point this out. He was catching, he suggested, while I was fishing. Considering he had previously treated some of my fishing photographs as evidence of lies, he was adapting remarkably well to the possibility that fish really did exist.
We approached a commercial fisherman working his pots with his wife and two children aboard, thinking we might offer him the flathead frames for bait. It was a sensible enough arrangement until we discovered neither of us had a sharp knife to fillet the fish. That left our practical idea some distance from practical execution, and the frames stayed with us. Around lunchtime, with Julian needing to return to Sydney, we called it a day.
He had three flathead and I had not had a bite. We had used the same rigs, the same lures and much the same technique, which gave me very little useful material for a defence. Yet I remember the morning as more than a defeat, even allowing for my understandable interest in finding another way to describe it. There had been the early light, the drifting, the weed, the ridiculous knife oversight and the pleasure of seeing him enjoy himself.
Other trips have offered far less evidence that either of us knew what we were doing. In July that year, after rain and flooding had made the lakes and estuaries unappealing, we tried the rocks at the northern end of Cellito Beach. Even obtaining bait became an expedition. One beach had lost its sand in the heavy seas, and another possible collecting place was so covered in foam and surge that we abandoned the attempt rather than persevere.
We bought squid instead and tried our luck that afternoon. The luderick and black drummer we were seeking remained elsewhere, leaving us with snags, re-rigging and a few fish that had not appeared on the invitation. Julian caught a wirra cod that went back after a photograph, and later became involved in what looked like another substantial struggle. The eventual arrival of a piece of kelp gave us plenty to discuss.
That outing required attention to the sea as well as the lines. There is no drifting away into your thoughts on the rocks at the expense of watching the water, and the conditions had already persuaded us to give up on collecting our preferred bait. But there was still pleasure in the undertaking, the search for an option, the shared work and the opportunity to assess each other’s performance. Julian won that day too, although we had to count fish we were not keeping to produce a result.
The quieter hours on a boat offer a different sort of attention. I can be aware of my line and still have room to notice the place around me, or let a thought take its time without being required to do anything useful with it. A long walk can give me that same freedom. There is something to occupy the body, enough happening to hold an interest, and no requirement that every minute justify itself.
Having someone beside me does not necessarily interrupt that solitude. With Julian, it can make it easier, because I am enjoying his company without needing to turn the day into a conversation about enjoying his company. He can have his thoughts and I can have mine. When either of us has something to say, there is someone there to hear it, even if the first response is likely to be an assessment of our fishing ability.
I would not pretend to know what occupies his mind in those stretches. He has his own life, his own interests and things he may or may not feel like discussing with his father. That is part of the ease of it for me. We can spend time together without my needing to extract a report, offer advice or decide that silence is a problem requiring attention.
Writing in January 2025, I was looking forward to another visit and hoping we might get onto the water. There were reports of good fish around, but the weather was threatening to interfere again, and Julian’s vertigo remained a consideration. He had been to South America, with hundreds of photographs from Machu Picchu, and there would be stories to hear when he felt like telling them. If fishing proved impossible, there was always the pool table, where our ability to offer commentary on each other’s shortcomings was equally well developed.
That anticipation says something about what I am really seeking when I hope we can go fishing. The chance of a good catch certainly helps, and I am quite capable of becoming absorbed in trying to improve a poor one. But I also want that stretch of time in which neither of us needs to be somewhere else. A visit has a departure attached to it; a few hours on the water allow us to stop looking towards it for a while.
Therapeutic is a reasonable word for how I find those hours, provided I use it in the ordinary sense of coming back feeling that the day has done me some good. Nothing particularly profound has to occur. I need not solve anything, arrive at a new understanding or return with a story anybody else would consider worth hearing. Sometimes I have simply been outside with my son, occupied by something we both enjoy.
There is room for that in the way I like to experience a place. Walking gives us time to take things in, and fishing can persuade us to stay long enough for the same thing to happen. A stretch of water becomes familiar through its shallows, weed lines, changing light and the places where we have tried our luck. We have been there together, rather than merely passed it on the way to somewhere more promising.
From a distance, we may still look like two idiots dangling lines into water where nothing is biting. I can live with that assessment, especially if it leaves us free to continue for another drift. Julian is beside me, there is no shortage of water, and sooner or later one of us will have something to say. With any luck, it will be me announcing a fish.
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