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Deep Water Delights
By Ben Knaggs |
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There are some places on this earth that are just made for fisherman. Pondalowie Bay is one of them. Located on what we can appropriately call the ‘toe’ of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula (the peninsula looks very much like a leg with a somewhat bunioned foot on its end) and encapsulated by the Innes National Park, this wide, shallow bay huddles in the bosom of coastline that is perennially hammered by the buffeting swells of the open Southern Ocean. One glance at this circular bay and you’ll have a physical definition of the phrase ‘safe anchorage’. It’s a fair bet that many a cray boat skipper has breathed a heavy sigh of relief at passing back through the entrance to this bay with a viscous southerly squall
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cutting up on the angry sea outside. But there’s a good reason for steaming out through the narrow heads of this anchorage, and not just if you’re on a cray boat either. With the swell down and the wind in a placid mood, head out from Pondalowie’s protective arms and you’ll find a playing field full of promise. Deep water kicks in very close to the coast here and continues out to sea, only interrupted by the cliff-lined northern shore of Kangaroo Island. Relatively close by lie the much smaller Isles of Wedge and Althorpes which are lightly fished and surrounded by waters that can turn up some ultra impressive fish. Below the water-line the seafloor has topography like a sixteen-year olds face – lumps and bumps everywhere. It all adds up
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to prime habitat for many of the prized deep-dwelling reef fishes that call the cool southern waters home.
To access these grounds though, you really gotta know what you’re doing. I’ve fished wide of Pondalowie Bay a few times now, and always under the guidance of Mark Wynbergen of Reef Encounters fish and dive charters. Mark works these waters pretty well year round on his 27 foot custom built flybridge cat “Freedom II” and certainly knows the place to front. Freedom II is a great boat to fish out of as well. If you’re anything like me you’ll know there’s only one way to travel on any boat – fast! With her two foils up and on top of the water Freedom II flies for the biggish boat she is, making the high-speed, swell
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| jumping ride out to the drops half the fun! Mark can be contacted on 83494271. Now I’m no meat fisherman (is there anything that’s more of a pain in the arse than filleting fish at the end of a day on the water?), but many of the fish that occupy the lumps out from Pondalowie Bay are more than worthy of a quick ice slurry death in the esky. Probably the most prolific species is the ever-popular snapper. Fishing lumps in the thirty to eighty metre depth range, aggregations of smaller, what we south Aussie like to call ‘rugger’
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snapper are usually not too difficult to find. Aggressive and opportunistic by nature, these little reds are usually the first fish to come over the side when dropping baits down to see who’s at home. The slight draw-back is the size. You generally won’t find any of those famous SA monster reds on these deeper drops, regardless of the area you fish, with any snapper over about five kilos to be considered a real good fish. If you’re not trophy hunting though, there is only a good thing. Thought I and surely anyone who’s ever |
caught one loves a big snapper, they are crap eating. Ruggers are another story. The pan sized fillets
taken off a quickly killed, bled, iced and gutted snapper are a delight on the plate, so a catch of lump-dwelling little reds is more than welcome.
You’ll soon be snobbishly tossing snapper fillets from you plate if you come across a school of another deep-dwelling redhead though. Nannygai occupy the deep lumps wide of Pondalowie and are fantastic eating at any size. No really, they are scrum-diddly-umtious! To be correct these fish aren’t really nannygai. The true nannygai are those smaller fish that you east coasters like to feed to big yellowfin tuna (or would, if they still existed). South Aussie Nannygai are tagged with the moniker ‘red snapper’ which is just lame. I for one will continue to call them nannies, because they really, really look like nannygai and when it comes down to it ‘nannygai’ is a far cooler name than red snapper. Then again, you could just call them dinner! Great eating is really the only thing these fellas have going for them. They don’t fight, they can be temperamental, they are covered in sharp bits (even the scales!) and are buggers to clean. In fact just before you hoe into your first feed of them you won’t want to fish for them ever again. Two bites and you’ll back-flip quicker than a Liberal party politician! Nannygai swarm in big schools over many of the lumps off Pondalowie, and although they can shut down completely and flat out refuse to sniff the juiciest bait, when they’re on they will eat you out of house and squid heads.
An even more elusive prize to be found out this way, yet still a complete quitter on the end of a line, is the harlequin fish. Harlequins are the southern Australian version of the coral trout, but were born absolute pacifists. They are superb eating fish though, so make a very pleasant surprise when dragged to the surface. Having that dirty great leather jacket or parrot fish you’ve just hooked suddenly materialise from the blue as a gorgeous big harlequin would turn anyone’s frown upside down. Although far from rare, harlequin fish are one of those fish that just turn up on occasion, so can’t really be targeted. They do make the deep dropping lucky-dip that much more exciting though.
Blue morwong are another deep water reef specie to be found out this way that just ‘turn up’. Once again they do feature regularly in the bottom basher’s bag, but can’t really be considered a targetable fish. When hooked though, they can put up a nice old stink. Growing to about ten kilos
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they have the bulk to pull string as well or better than any snapper, and are widely reckoned to just phase the revered red ones on the plate as well.
Our next potential dinner date needs no introduction. Big king george whiting move onto deep water reef systems to carry out their spawning shenanigans, and there are some thumpers to be found off Pondalowie. In fact, I’d even go so far to say that if you pulled up a KG that wasn’t over the one kilo aspiration-mark, you’d have fair cause to whinge. As eye-popping a moment as it is though, the landing of a kilo plus KG does present you with a slight ethical dilemma. As we’ve skimmed across above, these big fighting whiting are the brood-stock of the entire South Aussie whiting fishery, so it’s an idea to seriously consider popping that thumper back over the side after a quick pic. Take into account too that these big KG’s aren’t a patch on the smaller whiting of the bays and gulfs when it comes to matters gastronomical. The choice, as always though, is entirely yours and you have every right to it.
Then there are the bag toppers. If,
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heaven forbid, the snapper aren’t schooling, the nannies fobbish and no harlequins, morwong or whiting happen along, these guys are the arse savers. Big horse-shoe leather jackets, huge sea sweep, flathead and braid burning silver trevally are all decent enough on the plate to supplement a sick looking kill well. Sue, none of them (with the possible exception of the flatties) rate as highly as the gourmet stuff we’ve just perused our way through, but they will give you something to much on while blaming the weather, tides, water temperature, terrorists, Telstra or whatever else you can come up with for the lack of fish you caught. Thankfully though at Pondie, this problem shouldn’t crop up too much.
So anyways, the bottom line is a day out on the blue wide of Pondalowie Bay is highly likely to yield a seafood smorgasbord fit for some sort of royalty figurehead. But to score a nice mixed bag of these top-notch table gracers, you need to be able to get out through the Pondalowie Heads and search them out. Unfortunately, this aint always as straight
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forward as it seems. The very reason these deep water species exist in such numbers off a coast that has been a holidaymaker’s playground since God invented the Kingswood is what keeps many a Pondie-bound boat fastened to its trailer – the constant heavy weather. Although there are plenty of good grounds within easy reach of the Pondalowie Bay entrance, the big swells that perpetually sweep over them are often too much for your average trailer boat to handle with safety and/or comfort. So it is very much a case of picking your days. To increase the odds of hitting some calm spells, it’s definitely smart to try and fish the autumn/early winter season. It’s at this time of year when the South Australian seas are at their kindest, with the swells generally down before winter’s roaring cold fronts sweep in and summer’s infuriatingly constant strong afternoon sea breeze gales dropping out. The last of the Leeuwin current’s warm waters will still be lapping along the coast at this time of year too, which tends to help the fishing.
Like I said at the start, Pondalowie is within the protective confines of a
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national park, so don’t be expecting a sealed, all weather, multi-lane ramp with luxuriously wide floating pontoons. The beach launch at the top of the bay isn’t too bad at all, but your larger boats may find the water a bit too skinny to launch on the low tide. The sand is usually quite firm, but it’s still just common sense to only attempt a retrieval with a 4WD.
Once on the water, there are a lot of options. Close to the coast you’ll find dozens of reef systems popping up on the sounder. Rather than attempting to fish each one, try utilising your sounder to its full potential and scan around for likely schools of fish. Finding promising readings on the LCD screen is easy enough, but often these will turn out to be nothing more than clouds of leather jackets, blue throat parrotfish and rock cod. Each model of sounder is different so it’s a bit hard to define exactly what you’re looking
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for, but generally the schooling nannygai and snapper will hold in denser packs, whilst the swarms of rubbish fish will be spread out in an ugly smudge above the reef. Venturing out further out to sea, there are some impressive reefs and mini pinnacles if you can find them or coax the GPS coordinates out of one of the local cray boys!
The other alternative is to keep motoring and prospect the waters around either Althropes or Wedge Islands. I am yet to hit weather kind enough to allow me to sample these grounds, but I’ve heard of and seen some of the nice fish that patrol these lightly fished islands.
How to fish a particular drop can be a bit of a guess. With the funnelling influence of two big gulfs and Kangaroo Island having an affect on the tidal fluctuations and current direction, there can be some odd water movement wide of Pondalowie. Add to this
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the affect of the swell and wine (which always seem to be diametrically opposed!) and getting a good drift over a reef system is often a major migraine. Ideally drift fishing is what you want to be doing to cover more ground, but to fish a reef properly it’s usually best to anchor up. This means putting out a lot of rope and taking your time to get the drop right on the first attempt, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Grounds over about 60-80 metres depth are probably too difficult a task to anchor on, so can only be drifted, but most of the reef systems you’ll find you’ll be in the 30-60 metre range.
To get a bait down there you just can’t beat the tried and true paternoster rig. There are plenty of critters with teeth that swim around these parts, so tie up rigs with a tough skinned leader material of at least 80lb. Twisted dropper loops help keep things nice and straight and untangled, with single
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down on rod pumps. I’ve recently been trying a few heavy threadline combinations for fishing these deeper waters with encouraging results. Sure, a big threadline is heavier than a similar overhead and needs to be of exceptional design and manufacture to cope with the pressure, but for sheer cranking power a threadline outfit probably outdoes your standard overhead combo.
Having hauled up a struggling nanny, snapper, morwong, harlequin or whatever, the best thing you can have waiting for it is a healthy saltwater ice slurry. This not only kills the fish quick smart but also puts the flesh into intense rigor mortis very rapidly, making for absolute A-grade fillets. At the cleaning table those bloody razor edged nannygai will do their best to get some vengeance on you their murderer with a seeming attempt at death by a thousand cuts. The thing to do is have a pair of filleting gloves and only grip the fish by that bucket mouth where the sand-paper like teeth won’t do you any significant damage. Rip the fillets off, skin them and cook them any way you please to enjoy one of the best table fish to be found.
Of course, a heap of sweet eating fillets is not the end of the Pondalowie story. Dropping baits or jigs down to deep water reefs in this sort of lightly fished country has an element of Russian roulette to it. Sooner or later there will be a BIG hook-up. Powerful nasty things like big kingies, samsons, school sharks and groper also haunt these reefs and are always a chance of turning up in the middle of a pleasant table fish session. The next snapper bite that comes up tight as an unstoppable animal hell-bent on diving under a reef edge will not be the last. I haven’t had the pleasure of such back breaking experience wide of Pondie yet, but I’m sure it will happen. Then there’s the light tackle sportfishing options around Wedge and Althorpes Islands for big salmon, silver trevally and such plus the mako, hammerhead and big bronze whaler sharks on the prowl through the warmer months. In short, watch this space!
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chem. Sharp hooks of 5/0 to 8/0 the go at the business end of things. Sinker weights will need to be about 112g (4oz) to get down quick and stay there against the pull of the current and/or drift of the boat, but you’ll need a good range of sizes up to as much as 224g (8oz) to suit the prevailing conditions. Make up a bunch of these rigs before hitting the water because the heavy reef will claim a few through a session and the small but highly abrasive teeth of the nannygai will weaken even the heaviest leader after only a few fish.
Baits only have to have one important quality to be of use – they have to be tough! Those swarming leatheries, rock cod and blue-throats are an absolute menace around these parts, so you need a bait that will hold on through the constant picking until something serious happens along. Squid is the obvious choice, being nice and tough, but also a highly desirable snack food for a hungry reefie. Cuttlefish and octopus is even better, while tough skinned fish baits like tommies, trevally, fresh slimies and such will pull the big bites as well. To cut down on the constant re-baiting,
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try attaching a soft plastic or big, flashy saltwater fly to the top leader of your paternoster. This not only means you’ll still have the chance at a fish should the pickers be stripping cut baits as soon as they hit the bottom, but also tends to attract the attention of the larger fish on the reefs. Nannygai in particular will also scoff flashy heavy metal jigs, but usually only when in the aggressive mood brought on by the competitive environment of a big school. Not being the quickest thing on fins, they also require a slower jigging action, with a long, slow lift of the rod the best action to give them a chance to catch up to the jig.
Winding up a lot of line with, hopefully, a decent, struggling weight on the end all day is undeniably hard work, so the benefit of a comfortable and suitable outfit is muscles that won’t ache too much at days end. Rods should be powerful but ergonomic. Make sure you’re not hunched over or stretched out all day by using a stick that suits your body type. Reels need a super-smooth drag system that can handle say, 50lb braid, but also a fastish retrieve ratio to cut
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