Matt Flynn's Bloggamundi

Took the the tin lids to East Point today, with a couple of rods and a packet of prawns.

Aside from sand crabs, there wasn’t much happening. One rod took off for the water and my wife saved it, but the fish kept going out to sea and broke off.

Aside from that the pictures tell the story.

Dropped in at Hurley’s Aquariums on the way home. To misquote Saturday Night Live: “I got a fever, and the only prescription … is more fish!”

Got home and realised I’d missed the AFANT meeting. Oh well, I wasn’t keen on hearing Inpex explain how they would blow up Darwin Harbour’s Walker Shoal without doing any significant damage anyway.

The one that didn't get away

Maggie at work

Welcome to FISH FINDER TM FFF Blogs. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I spent the past six weeks travelling to the Kimberley, Tasmania, Brisbane and Hotham.

The Kimberley trip was a 12-day stint with Mal Miles of www.darwinbluewater.com.au as part of a prize for lucky NTMAG reader Jon ‘The Fisho’ Vogel.

It was a great trip to some new areas, and will feature in the Feb 2010 NTMAG.

Tasmania was a work and play trip – a long story – suffice to say it rained the whole time as Tassie’s years-long drought had broken in a big way, with eight weeks of non-stop rain.

The place was glowing green and beautiful, but our tot got a chest infection and no fishing was done.

Instead we tucked into venison pies, Tassie seafood, checked out local arts and crafts and enjoyed the log fires – a nice change.

I was disappointed to see the extent of forestry in Tasmania – companies like Great Southern and Timbercorp have ripped out large tracts of natural forest to install monoculture plantations, and the forest clearing continues.

Sadly, there have been problems with the forestry – not least that Great Southern and Timbercorp went bust.

The forestry issue is a lesson for the NT. We are still in a position in the NT to fight these sort of things, and at least demand proper management of agriculture.

So, then it was on to Brisbane where the traffic was crazy. It was dry, dusty and fairly f…..d up with unbelievable traffic. We were there shortly after the NSW dust storm went through.

The Brisbane I remember as a kid was green and lush. Coming back to Darwin was a relief.

Darwin is a great place.

Today I went to Cape Hotham, my first barra fishing trip for a while.

The fish were biting on lures for the early push out tide. Fresh barramundi for tea, and all free of chemicals. We take clean fish for granted, but they don’t in Tassie.

And the Saltwater Arm/Leaders Ck road was smooth – great stuff!

I wrote this in 1995 before 9/11-style terrorism, when travel journalists were sometimes allowed to sit in the jump seat behind the pilot on commercial jet flights.
Thought I’d post it for something different.

*****

"May I visit the cockpit," I asked the frightfully polite and proper Malaysia Airlines stewardess.
"Yes, that will be OK Mr Flynn, but I must go and ask the captain."
It was only a short trip to the cockpit, but there were a million smiles along the way.
These were all from the crew _ there weren’t many passengers in business class on the Monday morning flight from Kuala Lumpur to Darwin.
Not that anyone missed the lack of Aussie company – the lucky few passengers were receiving virtually undivided attention from the lovely Malaysian hostesses.
But while I will one day perhaps forget those hostesses, I won’t forget the sight of that cockpit.
There sat two pilots in front of a panel.
There were no controls, no steering column, no joystick with which the pilots of yesteryear would have wrestled their planes through storms and war zones.
The throttle controls _ instantly identifiable to anyone who has watched one or two airport dramas _ were the only thing I recognised.
Hell, even the dials that used to cover every inch of cockpit wallspace in older jets were missing.
In their place were a few computer-generated images.
"My God, this thing is automatic _ we’re relying on a computer," I thought.
The pilot, after introductions, must have recognised my horror.
"It’s all fly by wire you know," he said. "I still have this joy stick, but the control inputs are now electronic signals."
"What joystick?" I asked.
He leaned back and there it was _ a joystick in his left hand that looked pretty much the same as one you would buy at a Dick Smith’s outlet for a home computer game.
It was all a bit much. Earlier I had relived the old fantasy that the pilots got food poisoning and I volunteered to fly the plane.
Some help I would have been: "Can we reboot? I think I’ve crashed the computer."
Also surprising was just how small the cockpit was.
The Airbus is a wide-body plane and the passenger compartment is known for its spaciousness.
But the cockpit was like a dark corner in a pinball parlor, with darkened faces slightly illuminated by various colored lights.
As I sat behind the pilot and co-pilot, they would occasionally talk to each other and then twiddle a knob.
"The ningcalibrator is osmollating a little over 6.023. Maybe we should slice the 3.14," I vaguely recall the co-pilot saying.
"Don’t worry about it," the pilot said.
The ride started getting bumpy
and I looked up at the windscreen.
"My God, lightning!" I exclaimed, as strands of blue electricity crawled slowly over the cockpit window.
"No, no. That’s St Elmo’s fire," the pilot said.
"We see it quite often."
Right.
It was the weirdest thing.
Like evil hands, it caressed the glass as if trying to seduce its way inside to wreak havoc with the flight computer.
I asked: "What happens if the plane is hit by lightning."
It was a question I had always wanted to ask a jet pilot.
"Not much," the pilot said. "It just leaves a small mark."
Later I was invited back to the cockpit for the landing in Darwin.
I was strapped into a seat behind the co-pilot.
In the distance I could just see the lights of Darwin runway, like a scene out of so many airport movies.
As we neared the airstrip the cockpit quietened.
Ah yes. The pilots were concentrating on the landing approach …
I said nothing. I didn’t want be a mystery voice on the black box flight recorder asking "what does this bit do?" just before the jet plummeted to earth.
Closer to the runway there was silence.
Suddenly the cabin door swung open.
The steward pushed his way through and called: "Glasses, any glasses!?"
The pilot and co-pilot passed out there empties.
Nearer still, another shock.
The flight computer talked.
"100," it said in a loud stern voice.
It was referring to altitude, I suppose.
"50," it said a little louder.
Then, just off the tarmac, in an urgent and loud tone.
"Retard! Retard! Retard!"
From this I gathered that a)the computer was politically incorrect b)something had been lost in the manufacturer’s translations c)we were going to crash unless someone did something quick.
But the pilot took the retard remark as a queue to pull back the throttle and flare the plane for a gentle touchdown.
And the Airbus did just that, landing about as gently as something that big and heavy can.

Just did a trip with BarraBeast to scare the fish on the Adelaide River.

Before leaving, Beasty ripped a rubber ducky from his son’s grasp and said "that’s mine".

We hit the mouth of the Adelaide and Beasty soon hooked and lost a metre fish in The Narrows (I forget what type of lure) but it was quiet, so we went up Cape Hotham for a look around.

A net boat was there (of course) and despite being baitfish around, flat calm and perfect tide for our spot there were only a few fish about, most of them small.

Lost one 70-80cm barra at a creek mouth and got a couple of blue salmon, plus a couple of small barra.

Beasty rigged up a rubber ducky popper and sure enough got a small barra at a spot I had just flogged with a gold Bomber. An absolute kwackup. Now looking for a Chinese factory to make them.

Funny that my only run-off trip this year (due to work commitments with the FISH FINDER book) had to be near a net boat.

As you may recall the NT Government put the net closure line on the Adelaide River in close to the river entrance when they closed it to netting, and it looks like history will repeat itself at the Finniss – seems hardly worth closing the rivers unless the closure lines contain a good area around the mouth.

But it was good to catch up with Beasty and have a cast.

His new Suzuki 90hp is brilliant, very quiet, plenty of power. I gotta get some WWI flying goggles now …

Just found this one, my personal best snapper, caught it when I was 15 at Brighton Jetty, SA.

Good snapper jetty was that one. Didn’t catch much else there though, apart from sharks and rays and occasionally a run of two-spot sand crabs. Tommies didn’t hang around there much although the squid showed up sometimes.

Here’s a few nostalgia pix for a laugh, showing the development of the teen Flynn’s fishing habit.

I spent my early teens hanging around the wharves, jetties, rivers, and beaches of Adelaide, SA.

Started off catching tommies, bream, salmon etc with dad and then I went off on my own catching snapper and mulloway, as well as a stint catching sharks and rays off the metro jetties, which I think has now been banned.

Here’s a nice eagle ray off Grange or Henley jetty – or maybe Semaphore? Caught on my trusty old Penn Senator 6/0 and a solid glass game rod which I stripped down and rebuilt. Could have used that rod as an effective club. Eagle rays are great fun – they run fast and jump out of the water. That’s a Port Adelaide beanie & St Peter and Merrow Grange School (UK) scarf.

Here’s a smooth stingray, or perhaps a black stingray. Not sure. These things have huge spines on their tails that they can lift away from the tail at quite an angle. Eagle rays had only a small spine. These rays were slow but strong. And yep, I’m wearing a harness, home made out of some old leather belt, rope and corduroy trouser material, with two stainless quick clips. I should have kept that harness, it was bizarre :rofl:

Check my haircut! This is my first mulloway, caught off Outer Harbour wharf almost next to the rock wall. When we weren’t catching "butterfish" (which was most of the time) we were chasing wharf rats. And doing other dumb stuff.

A bigger mulloway, this one off the Outer Harbour rock wall.

Big snapper were a regular catch off Adelaide jetties for us. Usually they bit at night during a storm, but not always, as we caught a couple in flat calm. One night we caught six over 10kg during a storm that broke Brighton jetty (after we left). The biggest we caught was 14kg. Some of them were real "old man" snapper with big noses.

Had the fishing photo bug from an early age. I caught these bream outside the Birkenhead Tavern on the Port River using a light handmade rod based on a Fenwick blank. Did the diamond binding myself – stuffed if I can remember how now. And that is a Penn Level-Matic baitcaster – probably the only one in use in Adelaide back then as most people used eggbeaters or Alvey sidecast reels, or occasionally large overheads.

If this is of interest I can post more – I’ve got some funny old photos. I’ll wait until I hear the clamour … :rofl: