5:30am I was invited to meet a friend at the boat ramp as we needed an early start to beat the traffic. We hit the seas and the seas hit back - it was a bit lumpier out then than expected so we took it slow.
Soon after we were met with the warm golden glow of sunrise as the sun hid just behind the hills in the distance.
We pulled up to the 1st stop and were straight onto the fish, small snapper everywhere but they are currently restricted from keeping. So back in the water they went and off to a new spot we went. This proved a great move with our bag limit of 40 crabs coming in under 2 hours and 1 King George whiting amongst the chaos of crab net retrieval.
A stingray and baby shark both visited us there but were too fast for me on my GoPro to get a shot of. We up anchored and tried a few more spots in search of more whiting and after a couple of donuts(zero fish) we found where they were - in much closer to the shore than we had been trying.
We picked up 8 more for a total of 9 whiting and 40 crabs for the day.
And that’s where the fun ended but the story didn’t.
We got back to the boat ramp and there was a queue, an extremely low tide was making boat retrieval very difficult. We waited patiently for our turn which revealed the problem so many were having; there was about a foot drop off at the end of the ramp. Usually not an issue because low tides weren’t usually this low and car trailer tires didn’t get anywhere near it at high tide.
Once the boat was on the trailer my mate tried to pull
it up over the 1ft high ledge. After a genuine concern and struggle we had to let the boat back off the trailer and drive the car further forward before attempting to get the boat on it again.
Success! We safely got the boat onto the trailer and pulled it up the steep ramp. But things got even worse for me. I got home by 2pm and cleaned a few things up, a headache slowly began to get the better of me so I had a room temperature shower and a lay down. The headache worsened so I took some Panadol blocked out the lights in my room and applied some ice to various body parts. But then the calf muscle cramp came intensely and combined with a lack of sleep and heat stroke it got the better of me. I fought it with 2 cold showers, a cold bath more headache tablets and ice packs until 8:30pm then I took some sleeping tablets in hope of finally getting some relief. Took another hour before I slept and thankfully woke the next morning without the headache.
I cleaned up the blue crabs and as you can see in the picture they turn red once boiled.
