North Australian FISH FINDER TM forums

My 4 year old watched a video about how to hold crabs and since then had been bugging me to catch a crab with him. With my tackle shop voucher I bought some pots and texted a mate inviting him and his older son crabbing that afternoon. He must have asked a bit too loudly as his 3-year old piped up and said he wanted to join. By the time I’d texted OK he had run to his room and put his Christmas fishing shirt on ready to go.

I rigged up the pots and the 5 of us met up at the ramp. Sunscreened up we loaded my mate and all the kids in the boat and I dropped them off the trailer into the water. After parking the car I saw them slowly drifting with the tide- flat battery! Luckily I have 2 house batteries (and 2 more deep cycles), so with the flick of a switch and t=the turn of a key the engine purred to life.

I jumped on board and we gently motored to the first gutter. The youngest child wasn’t too keen on the boat moving and I thought we were in for a tough trip given the engine and whinge dramas already!

We chucked the pots in and asked the kids to keep track of where we’d put them. Then we putted across to a gravel patch near the ramp that I’ve seen before. We rigged up all the boys’ rods and dropped the baits over. Straight up we were onto goldies!! The kids had a great time pulling them in and eating Christmas ham sandwiches and chips. I think us dads had an even better time watching and wrangling. Pure joy and chaos, the deck was soon ankle deep in goldies, sandwiches and chip crumbs. The goldies were not a bad size (biggest was 40cm) and we kept half a dozen.

After the 40 mins of frantic fishing we went to pull the pots. The youngest boy turned out to have the eagle eyes and could spot the pots from miles away Pot 1 was just box jellyfish, but the other 3 contained 9 blue swimmer crabs. Success! We kept the biggest and were back off the water within 90 mins of launching. Probably 200mL of fuel used and a great time was had by all.

We had whole goldie with soy sauce and crab with coriander chilli for dinner, yum!

Great to see everyone into it, all the best for 2020 Jack and co

“Christmas ham sandwiches and chips”

Hmmmm, ..... Yummmmm.

Great stuff with the kids.

Cool post mate ,, smiles all round

great report, ive had a couple of successful crab runs with the kids (5&2). haven't managed to find any fish for them in the short window of attention span though.