Nanga Station Fishing 1970
August school holidays 1970 was the year we returned to Nanga Station with our boat to try our luck catching some of those huge snapper we saw the year before. This was the beginning of many trips the family would take to Nanga Station over the next 25 to year years, with various family members.
Leaving early morning on the road trip that took quite a few hours traveling some 778kms 9 – 10 hours on the road, dad towed the sand piper boat with the Holden brougham, while graham towed the trailer with his Holden HQ, refuelling along the way and other rest stops, but dad was always keen to make good time, (I think he just wanted to go fishing)
On arriving at Nanga we would proceed to setup camp, this meant unpacking, pitching tents, making beds, and generally getting ready for the next two weeks. Next was launching the boat and finding a mourning point as the boat was left in the water for the two weeks, because the tide would be out in the morning making it impossible to put the boat in the water, quite often the boat would be sitting hi and dry on the sand in the morning and we would have to wait for the tide to come back in a little so we could float the boat out into deeper water to be able to leave for fishing.
At first we didn’t even know were to go fishing, but after asking around a little of other fisherman plus the care taker we soon were on our way to find some big ones, about 12kms off the coast and with the help of the echo sounder looking for rocky outcrops, as the snapper seen to like living around these. Fishing with a No 4 suicide hook a strip of mullet bait connected to a metre or so of trace wire then 4mm green nylon cord, all taken to the bottom with a large homemade diamond sinker.
We tried our luck in a few spots, one spot we got onto some sharks and that was all, to the point we had sharks swimming around the boat get larger and larger, time to pull up the anchor and get the hell out of there, final we hooked up on some snapper, there were just as huge as the ones we had seen on the beach the year before, it was not unusual for us to bring in 15 – 20 each trip, with occasional queenie, for some reason Dad would always mange to catch these on this gut line that was always much harder on the hands to pull in.
After a days fishing we would always have to then scale and remove the filets, on the bench’s at the boat ramp, standing around these bench’s was a little strange as there were thousands of scales on the ground, the fish fillets were able to be stored in the freezer at the Nanga homestead for a small fee.
It was not always fishing, we did do some site seeing, Shell beach was always a favourite, Hamline Pools, some of the beach spot on the way into Shark bay for supplies like fresh bread because every thing at Nanga was quite expensive.
I can remember the power would quite often go off at the campsite, this was supplied by a diesel generator onsite, the homestead owner would have to tend to any power outages, like it ran out of diesel or more, one night I remember Dad and Graham going to help out as well, just the joys of living in very remote places.
