Aussie Rules!
UK Fly Fisher Magazine 2004
Jim Foster traveled to Australia’s Cape York Peninsula to experience some of the world’s best saltwater fly fishing..
I’d never seen anything like it before. There, in front of the boat, was a vast school of queenfish, every one over 20lb in weight and every one feeding on a bait ball of monolithic proportions. Queenies, as Australian anglers call them, were crashing into tiny baitfish, herding them into a huge ball and picking them off one-by-one until eventually every bit of prey had been consumed.
Above the sea, flocks of terns, gulls and skuas also feasted on the small fish that had been forced to the surface by the queens. But even the queenfish weren’t safe! Deep down we occasionally got a glimpse of a shark cruising menacingly along the edge of the frenzy, waiting for an opportune moment to strike.
This was fishing in its most primordial form. I imagined that, hundreds of years ago, before man’s reckless exploitation of the oceans, life in all tropical waters would have been like this. I felt privileged and, dare I say it, a little scared to witness the scenes of life, death and sheer brutality that Mother Nature was displaying.
I watched as queenfish after queenfish swam by the boat. Waiting for the right moment, I flicked my Chartreuse Clouser in front of a group of approaching 20lb-plus queens and started the retrieve. The fish kept coming, I kept retrieving, and I looked open-mouthed as a big queen attacked my fly, sucking it in before continuing on its way.
I pulled into the fish, lifting the 9-wt rod to begin the battle. Of course, the queenfish didn’t like that in the slightest! An aerial dogfight started, with the hooked queen leaping around madly, at times fully three or four feet in the air, desperately trying to rid itself of the fly.
When the leaping didn’t work, the fish decided that it didn’t want to be anywhere near me, so it started to run south with the tide, towards Cairns. And it ran. And ran! Yard after yard of backing crackled off my reel. I would guess around 150 yards of line was taken altogether before I could turn the fish and start pumping it back to the boat.
Fifteen minutes later and, after yet more acrobatics, I netted the queen and lifted her – with some difficulty – into the boat. I had to do it all solo as my mate Gareth, who was fishing with me, had also hooked up with a big queen of his own (if you’ll excuse the expression!).
So began a week of fishing heaven in an area of the world so remote that the nearest mainland civilisation of any size was probably a tribe somewhere in Papua New Guinea.
I had travelled for over 40 hours to reach Cape York. Included in that journey were four separate flights, over 30 hours in the air and well over eight hours spent hanging around the departure lounges of airports in London, Singapore, Sydney and Cairns.
The whole adventure had begun six months earlier when I had decided to do some research on Cape York the internet. It was then that I discovered a company run by a man called Greg Bethune who, along with his partner Jenny, owns a 19m long mothership named the ‘Tropic Paradise’. He also has a mini-fleet of seven dinghies stored on or behind the ‘Tropic Paradise’ that the clients fish from. It sounded perfect.
The trips are run in a very simple manner. You pay your money, fly to Bamaga (which I think is Australia’s northern-most airport) and get picked up in a minibus by Greg and his team of guides. From the airport they take you to Seisia, a small settlement at the very tip of Cape York. Here there is a wharf where you board the mothership.
As soon as everyone has boarded, Greg sets sail south for six hours to the first fishing destination, an anchor-point in the mouth of the Jackson River. There the ‘Tropic Paradise’ stays moored for three days, while the anglers fish out at sea from the dinghies or on the shore in the surrounding area.
On the fourth day, the anchors are pulled up and you travel back north to the MacDonald River, where you stay for another three days of fishing before finally heading back to Seisia.
The fishing is just unbelievable. Along with the queenfish there are three or four different species of trevally to catch (including giant trevally), tuna, a fish called the giant herring and – best of all – lots and lots of permit!
One morning’s tuna fishing really stands out in my mind. After breakfast, Gareth and I got our fishing gear and loaded it into the dinghy we would be sharing for the day – a boat named Mr Pink. We took our walkie-talkie off Jenny (they are given out for safety reasons), applied a liberal dosing of sun cream and made sure we had plenty of drinking water. I then took control of the outboard motor, starting it up first time, and eased the dinghy away from the mothership.
Once at sea, after negotiating our way through the maze of sandbars in the river mouth, Gareth and I scanned the water, looking for pelagic fish ‘busting up’ into bait balls.
The best way of finding tuna and queenfish is to look into the air for gulls and terns gathered together in one spot. If you can find feeding birds, then generally you’ll find the fish underneath them. On this morning, we soon found schools of tuna. But casting to them with a fly rod proved very difficult! The tuna were running down the coast at an incredible rate, feeding as they went, and as soon as you got the boat on a school you’d only get time for two or three casts before the fish had disappeared.
The trick was to persevere and position the boat ahead of the tuna, so they came to you rather than you steaming straight into the them, which invariably would spook the while shoal.
Once we had mastered the tactics required, we found we could sight-fish for the tuna. A school of fish would be found, the boat would be positioned ahead of them and Gareth and I would watch the water intently. We’d see the tuna coming towards us, skipping through the waves or travelling at a rate of knots just below the surface.
A cast would be made ahead of the fish we wanted to target. Then we’d strip the fly back as fast as we could and watch 20 or 30lb tuna swim rapidly up to the fly before taking it.
Hooking the fish wasn’t easy and plenty were lost. A normal strike with a 9-wt rod was not enough to pull the size 2/0 hooks that the flies had been dressed on home in the tuna’s hard mouth. Instead the best thing to do was ‘strip strike’. This involves stripping your line after the fish has taken the fly, until everything goes tight. As soon as you feel the hook go home, all you need to do is lean into the fish and start the fight.
On this particular day, after we’d boated four long-tailed tuna up to about 30lb, an enormous shark swam right underneath the boat. It was Gareth that spotted the giant, shouting “Shark! Shark!” in Jaws-esque style to let me know what he’d seen! On closer inspection, we noticed a couple of big cobia swimming alongside the predator.
This was a chance we couldn’t resist. The Cobia is a highly sought-after fish on the fly, and because I was ready to cast and Gareth wasn’t, he acted as the guide. My eyes weren’t tuned into what was going on sub-surface, but Gareth’s were and he could watch my fly as it landed in the sea ahead of the cobia.
"That’s perfect!" he said. "Retrieve now! The fish is coming up to your fly! It’s massive!"
Then bang! I had a take and pulled into it using the strip-strike technique. The fish was on and I was convinced I had hooked a big cobia. But I hadn’t! Although the cobia had swum up to the fly, looking like it was going to take, a big tuna had come in at the last moment and grabbed it instead!
The battles those tuna gave on 9-wt and 10-wt rods were immensely powerful. They just wouldn’t give up. Initially the fight would start with a long, searing run that would take well over 100 yards of backing off your reel. With the bigger tuna, we sometimes had to follow them in the boat for fear of being spooled.
Once the first run was out of the way, the fight turned into a real war. The tuna would sound and use its strength to stay deep. On a couple of occasions I had to hand-line fish in, as I just couldn’t get the power needed to pump a 20lb tuna up from 30 feet down using a 9-wt rod.
The Tackle You Will Need
I would definitely recommend taking two rods: a Scierra HM2 9-wt and a Guide Line 10-wt saltwater fly rod. These coped perfectly with everything that was thrown at them.
Reels
You will need a couple of corrosion-proof reels. I took three – a Scientific Anglers Large Arbor, a Scierra Traxion and a Guide Line Inex, all rated to take 10/12-wt lines.
Lines
I used two – an intermediate and a fast-sinking shooting head. The fast-sinking line is essential for the deep water trevally fishing, while the intermediate line was perfect for the flats fishing.
Leaders
These should be fluorocarbon where possible. I would recommend a minimum of 20lb and preferably 30 or even a 40lb tippet, especially for the tuna and queenfish.
Flies
Take Clousers! By far the best fly of the trip was the Chartreuse Clouser. If you want permit, take some crab flies as well. I bought all my flies from Fulling Mill and they performed superbly.
Extras
A high factor suncream and a peaked cap are both musts to protect yourself from the sun. Polarised glasses are vital too, not only for the sight fishing but to protect your eyes
Tackle Hire
Trip boss Greg Bethune is a very good fly angler. He has everything you need and you will be allowed to use it, on the basis that if you break anything you replace it.
While the mornings were good for tuna and queenfish, the afternoons were spent fishing for trevally – either at anchor over a reef or on the sand flats in the entrance to the rivers.
Anchoring was an interesting way of catching the trevally, and was certainly the best way to hook a GT. Greg had located a couple of rough-ground marks a mile or so off shore, which he had marked with buoys. It was then down to the anglers in the dinghy to anchor around the buoys and fish with fast-sinking shooting heads to get the flies down to the coral and stones below.
I have to admit that I wasn’t too successful at this technique. Although I caught trevally doing it, I only hooked two GT. One I lost when it dived to the coral below, cutting my 30lb leader off in the process; and the other was a baby GT. Gareth was unlucky to lose a very big GT, probably in excess of 30lb, when it swam underneath the prop of the dinghy next to us.
The sight fishing on the flats for the golden trevally was far more exciting. Here you could beach your boat and get out, looking for schools of ‘goldens’ as they swam in water barely three feet deep. It was when we did this with an Aussie guide named Phil Edwards that we experienced the best of the trevally fishing.
Phil knew exactly where to find fish. Trevally schools could be spotted on the flats from 100 yards away as big, dark shapes slowly swimming with the flooding tide over the sand. There’d be anything from 10 to 20 fish per school, and we’d carefully approach them before casting a Chartreuse Clouser towards them.
If the trevally weren’t spooked by the cast, we’d get a hook-up almost every time from fish in the 10 to 15lb bracket. Although they didn’t fight in a spectacular way, they were still worthy adversaries and would quite easily strip 80 to 100 yards of backing off the reels on their first runs.
But there was no comparison between the trevally and the permit that were hooked. As most anglers will be aware, permit are the ‘holy grail’ of saltwater fly fishing. Thousands of them live in waters off Cape York, and on the two days I actually fished for permit I must have had at least 20 ‘shots’ at shoals containing varying numbers of fish.
The only problem is that permit can be quite tricky to catch. They are wary in the extreme, and although it wasn’t hard to get the permit to come in and look at our crab patterns, getting them to actually take was very difficult.
On one morning I was wading ankle deep along a sandbar when I spied a shoal of permit coming towards me. I made a cast, and the Mirkin crab pattern I had tied on splashed down and sank to the sand in four feet of water. I waited until the fish were more or less on top of the fly, then started a slow retrieve – skipping the heavily-weighted crab imitation over the seabed.
The entire shoal of permit changed direction and swam up to the fly. Surely, I thought, I would get a take. And I did! My heart was pounding as a fish ripped off with the fly. I had hooked my first permit!
I shouted out to Gareth and Phil, and they came rushing over to help. But alarm bells started to ring in Phil’s head within a minute or so of him watching me. The ‘permit’ hadn’t taken that much line (maybe 50 yards) and apparently wasn’t displaying the kind of fight that permit usually give.
What I didn’t realise was that permit and trevally often swim together in the same shoals. What had happened here was that the entire shoal of permit had swum up to my fly to look at it, and unbeknown to me there was a trevally among them. Sod’s law dictated that it was the trevally that had taken my fly.
Later in the day I spotted another shoal of fish swimming in shallow water between two sand flats. Most of the fish were trevally, but among them I noticed a permit or two. I cast to the fish and got a take straight away. This time it was definitely a permit. The fish charged out to sea, then I got it back to the beach. Time after time when I thought I had it beat the fish would surge back out to sea on a powerful run, where I ran the risk of losing it to a shark.
But all ended well and roughly 45 minutes after hooking it I landed my first ever permit on the fly. It was a great feeling and, after releasing the fish, I did a little jig of delight along the sandbar, much to Phil’s amusement!
To finish off this article, I have to tell you about the giant herring. These are long, lean predators that hunt along the edge of sandbars; usually where the sand drops off into deep water.
At the entrance of the Jackson River, we found some long-looking silver fish hunting in the main river channel. Every now and then over a sandbar there would be a series of splashes as these fish would hurl themselves from the water while hunting.
We drifted along the edge of the sandbar, casting small 1/0 Clousers over the bar and retrieving back over the drop-off. It took a few casts for us to realise that these fish wanted the flies stripped back in mega-fast retrieves, but when we did find this out we hooked up with what can only be described as an acrobatic version of the bonefish. These giant herring were so fast that one melted a New Zealand angler’s spool when he hooked one!
It was Gareth that boated our first giant herring of the trip. It was long and lean, with a powerful tail and bright silver flanks – like a leaner version of the bonefish. Along with the permit, the giant herring was probably my favourite species of the whole trip.
I know that a trip to a place like this is not going to appeal to all readers of Today’s Flyfisher. The distance you need to travel will put a lot of people off, though I bet that the trip won’t be as expensive as you think. All I can say is that, if you ever get the chance to go, you must. I have fished in a lot of places around the world and nothing compared to this.
Fact File
Name of company: Carpentaria Seafaris
Facilties on boat: Superb! Flushing toilets, showers and beds with proper mattresses make the ‘Tropic Paradise’ a floating hotel
Food: All supplied. A resident chef prepared fabulous food for us, including the best seafood you will ever eat
Location: Bamaga/Seisia, Cape York, Australia
Contact: E-mail them on: info@seafaris.com.au
Website: www.seafaris.com.au. Check out the comprehensive catch reports here – that will give you a further indication as to the standard of fishing available
