By Ray Bricknell www.sbsfc.org
On the Logan River, I had one of the great fishing experiences of my life – one of those occasions you simply never forget.
I was out on the water very late for a morning fish. I travelled up to The Elbow, and the sounder indicated that the deep hole there was 50 feet deep at high tide.
Following advice, I anchored on the edge of the deep hole, in about 13 feet of water. I set two rods up in rod holders, one floating a bony bream I caught when throwing my bait net, a couple of metres below the surface, and the other on the bottom baited with a strip of mullet from my freezer. Both drags were set very light as I was trying to avoid having another rod and reel dragged over the side by a shark taking the bait “on the fly”. The bony bream lasted about 15 minutes and was taken without my seeing or hearing any action on the rod, so a big banana prawn went on to replace it.
I was rigging another rod, my tackle box open on the floor of the boat, when the rod up the front of the boat went off. It was exactly 11:00am. Something was taking the strip of mullet for a swim up the river – not a violent run; just very leisurely. I took the rod out of the rod holder, put a bit of tension on the line to sink the hook, and waited until the fish stopped taking the line.
After about 50 metres, it slowed a bit, and I started to try to recover some line. It didn’t take me long to realise I had a very big fish on the end of that line. You can tell when it is a very big fish – rather than frantically kicking and dashing and darting about, they seem to barely notice that they are dragging a line behind them.
I thought it was definitely not a shark. I have caught enough bull sharks in the Albert and Logan Rivers to know how they behave when hooked. They dash and dart all over the place, take you for a tour of the river, and nearly always leap out of the water soon after being hooked.
Neither did I think it was a big stingray. Stingrays have a characteristic feel to them when hooked, and this was not a ray. But it was a big fish, so I decided it had to be a jewfish, and it would clearly be the biggest jew I have ever caught.
The rig I had it on was about a 10 or 15 pound breaking strain mono line (say 5 to 7kg), two metres of 50 pound leader, a wire trace, and a live bait. I was determined to be patient, and to take as much time as was needed to tire the fish and gradually ease it to the boat.
The fish was covering a lot of territory, so I completely lost count of the number of times it swam around the boat and anchor line. It was at least six or eight times. I then decided to try to pull the anchor in, with one hand and a foot. I eventually got it in without losing the fish.
I was having to constantly walk from one end of the boat to the other to try to keep the line clear of my other rod and line. On one occasion, when the fish was going for a serious run, I stepped on the edge of my half-open tackle box and tipped the contents of one drawer all over the floor of the boat. What a mess!
At one point it swam just past the back of the boat and managed to wrap the line once around the propeller. I was able to tilt the motor out of the water with my spare hand and get the line off the prop. Then the fish headed for the big mangroves growing along the riverbank. When the boat was just two or three metres from the mangroves, the fish turned and headed out into the deeper water.
Twice, I got the fish close enough to the surface to be able to see the top of my leader, but the water was too muddy for me to be able to see the fish before it headed off for another leisurely “run”.
Eventually, after about 55 minutes I got the fish close enough to the boat for me to be able to get hold of the end of the leader. And I am quite certain that the shark that came to the surface alongside my 3.7 metre boat was every centimetre of two metres long. Its head was at least 30cm across – probably more.
I got hold of the end of the wire trace. I was trying to decide whether or not I was game to try to get hold of the bottom jaw with my grippers, to try to get the hook out, when the shark gave a bit of a kick and solved that problem for me – by snapping the wire trace. I was actually very relieved at that outcome and will never forget that fishing experience.
Published in print July-September 2022
