new south wales Your First Fish

[The fessor]

Being the season of fish ( on the table for many of us ).

Thought would be fun for us to recall stories about the first fish we each caught and some childhood fishing memories - I'm sure we all have these..

My story .

Way back in the early and mid 1960s people could hire motorized displacement boats on the Hunter River at Hexham. My first memory of a being taken fish was going so an afternoon's fishing with my dad and by BB in what was called a "put put" (this the sound the little (2 stroke ?) inboard motor on these timber displacement boats made as they cruised along about walking speed).I was handed a cork handline with a bit of peeled prawn on a hook and small ball sinker which my dad caste for me and then told me to sit quietly and hold the line between my two fingers and let him know if I felt anything - a tall order for little boy about 7 or 8 years old.Within a few minutes I told dad I had something pulling at the line and was told not to be so silly. But I insisted and dad checked telling me "it's just a snag" …. I didn't know what a snag was and insisted and proceeded to pull in the line and to my excitement discovered I had a big fish on the end of the (l was told it was a nice whiting) and was asked if I wanted to keep it or throw it back . Silly question. I insisted on keeping it and remember eating it and really enjoying it when mum battered it and fried it - much better than fishfingers (as a kid I thought they really were fishs' fingers and yep I though spaghetti in the can was worms in a can LOL).From that day on I was hooked and was soon going fishing down along the river bank at Hexham and on Ash Island , riding there with my mates on a pushbikes , and digging bloodworms and catching yabbies' and soldier crabs for bait and often catching garfish using tiny hooks baited with bits of wet bread, and using oyster bottles with doe in the end to catch poddy mullet (to sell live for pocket money). 

Lot of fish taken from the old Ash Is bridge  - is still there and people still can be seen fishing from it occasionally , but it's been decades since I fished it myself , though I do still cross it to go and collect weed for luderick fishing from the "pond" .

Plenty of fish taken on the opposite bank to the Sth Arm of the Hunter River to the Steelworks ( nice sandy banks there and places where there used to be mangroves (there's a coal loader there now).

Mum and dad always knew I'd be gone on the pushbike about 4am every Saturday and Sunday , and  most days during school holidays, .and I'd either be on Stockton BW ( I'd be waiting for the  first vehicular ferry of the day to arrive and was always allowed to take my pushbike across for free - no Stockton Bridge then)  , I used to fish The Wreck for tailor, bream, flathead, trevally and yellowtail , and being very a enterprising kid I'd keep some yellow tail alive to sell for 1 bob each to the jewie fishermen ( no such thing as battery powered live bait aerators in those days ) , who would use them to even catch jewfish during the day  , and back then used either big alveys or Ajax centrepins and big Styrofoam floats. I learnt a lot by watching these jewfish specialists  and was soon chasing jewfish too once I built my first Rangoon rod and after I was given my granddad's Surfmaster overhead reel (I still have this reel and still use it occasionally) , til then I was using a kiddie's baketite alvey til I upgraded to a Michelle 306 eggbeater (I still have and use it)..

It was then that I saw the biggest jewfish I'll ever see landed off the end of Stockton Wall by a guy using an Ajax reel and Rangoon cane rod , over 6 ft long and tipped the scales at the fisherman's (trawler) wharf at 98 pounds and was taken during a fresh when the Hunter was in flood in daylight hours (and he had quite a crowd of people watching and created a huge sensation locally (writeups in paper etc)).

I remember my granddads and dad telling me about jewfish up over 100 pound being taken in the 20s , 30s and 40s using setlines rigged up with cow bells to indicate something was hooked (usually a monster ray, or a huge eel , or a shark was what was caught this way)  , the set lines were baited before dark and the swarms of Hexham Grey mozzies showed up, and they'd be checked if the bell was heard or next day. I think monster 90 pound or bigger  jewfish are gone for good (at least here around Newcastle (Gosford to Taree) .

Biggest I've seen since it were 73 pound (me on Nobbys) , 76 pound (me at Carrington Dykes) and one I took fishing from the Sharkhole (Nobbys) while fishing for snapper from the rocks during the day, a few in the same size bracket taken by fishing pals on Nobbys over the years , and by Joe and the other Stockton BW guys , and my biggest at 86 pound (me on Nobbys) and longer than me (that I landed fishing the Flatrock on Nobby's Wall). It took me over 20 yrs to crack it with a jewfish over 50 pounds with a jewfish weighing in at 73 pound that I had to land by myself at Flatrock in the wee small hours one night in 1990 ( I had to keep in the bathtub with 4 bags of ice til the next day before I cleaned and slabbed it up for freezing ) , my little boy woke up not long after I got home and came running into our bedroom in terror - he though a monster had come up the plug hole and was going to eat him ( memories like that are priceless).

 Or I'd be fishing somewhere near the Pilots Station (at the old timber tug wharves, or on the rocks at Horse Shoe Beach (back then the beach was maybe 100m South of where is now and it was deep water off the end of what was a small breakwall (and a great place to catch tailor and small jewfish), or along wharf road (was very close to the harbor shore there) , and I've be home after dark with a bag full of fish ( tailor, flathead, bream, soapys, trevally and garfish were usually in the bag and all taken on very simple cork handlines and plastic casting handspool , even coke bottles made it into my kit (the glass ones were perfect for hand lines),

Thems were the days …

[ellicat]

Not the first, but the first I clearly remember, was at the mouth of Bell's Creek at Golden Beach, Caloundra.
It was what appeared to me to be a giant flathead caught on soldier crabs. I guess it was probably around 60cm which at the time was a monster to me around 7 yeras old. I remember being very excited to catch such a fish....until recently that is...when my Dad informed me that he was the one who 'caught' it and that he just let me wind it in.
I'll have to wait until he's passed on before I can retell the story of the day I caught it.

Before then it was just little forkies near Mt Crosby.

 

[Old Scaley]

I can clearly remember my first fish. My mum and dad and six of my brothers and sisters (another six were to follow in later years) were on the homeward leg of a caravanning adventure to Melbourne and back. Hard to imagine now having 8 humans in an old Humber sedan towing a van all that way and not being arrested or killing each other.

Anyway, we stopped in at the caravan park at Currumbin on the way home and my dad let me have a go with his cork hand line spooled with that old green fishing cord. I was six years old at the time in 1961 (hence the “old” in Old Scaley). I can’t remember what I was using for bait but I clearly remember running backwards up the sandy beach on Currumbin Creek to skulldrag a tiny whiting to dry land. The thrill of that capture never left me and I still get the same feeling today on the rare occasion that I catch a fish.

Being from such a big family there wasn’t much time or money to indulge any one child in their preferred hobby but I was lucky enough to be sent to Amity Point to spend most of my holidays with relatives who were early settlers there. I spent many an hour with a handline on the old jetty catching butter bream using dough my great uncle made up for me. Then I was allowed to cook some on a small fire on the beach in front of the house for breakfast or lunch. Occasionally I got to go out in Rainbow Channel with the men and catch some amazing reefies like parrot and sweetlip, or to run around on the Nash banks at low tide filling a sugar bag with spanner crabs that were then cooked up in an old copper to be eaten later around a campfire on the beach.

Happy days indeed.

[Guest]

Couple of things stand out for me in your post Scaley, first is, you really don't need 2kg line to catch whiting, second is, your Mum and Dad never had a TV hey!

[Old Scaley]

16 minutes ago, MSB said:

Couple of things stand out for me in your post Scaley, first is, you really don't need 2kg line to catch whiting, second is, your Mum and Dad never had a TV hey!

On the contrary @MSB.  They were early adopters of TV, but I suspect that it was just to distract us kids while they got down to the serious business of procreation

[John]

first fish was a flathead off the beach at mermaid beach. that year all we nearly caught were flathead off the beach.

[Dinodadog]

My first fish at the age of seven was a whiting, I dug a hole in the sand behind me and put it in and down come a blxxdy sea gull and took it, I cried for about an hour until I caught the next one.

[The fessor]

On ‎19‎/‎04‎/‎2019 at 3:31 PM, Old Scaley said:

On the contrary @MSB.  They were early adopters of TV, but I suspect that it was just to distract us kids while they got down to the serious business of procreation

My parents were the first in the street to buy a colour TV and a video recorder ( A Sanyo Betamax ).  Very few of my mates even had TVs when I was a little kid.  We were the only ones in the street who had a phone in the house right up into the early 70s , the nearest pay phone was about 1/4 mile away ( was 6p per call ) .

We had only 2 TV channels , ABC & NBN , and sometimes if the atmospherics were right we sometimes managed to get 10 , 7 from Sydney and 8 from Tamworth. If we wanted to see a movie on 10 or 7 we had to go to a mates place ( near the top of Woodstock Street or on other (south) side of the street, some had very tall tv masts and boosters and picked up the two Sydney networks),  Friday night and Saturday night and early morning SciFis and horror movies were an excuse for sleep over.

I remember feeling ripped off when we changed from pounds shillings and pence to dollars and cents ,  suddenly my pocket money didn't buy as much.