Growing FADs: Victoria's fish aggregation device trial launched

“This is one of the most dangerous bits of water in the world,” VFA technical officer Brent Womersley, our skipper for the day, shouts over the noise of the twin 225hp Honda outboard engines working way behind us. “I have a lot of respect for this bit of water.”

About 20 minutes earlier we’d left the quiet port of Queenscliff, headed for a couple of spots off the sleepy seaside villages of Lorne and Aireys Inlet on Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Aboard are two strange-looking devices – a pair of big, bright yellow cones equipped with flashing yellow lights with a small barb on top to prevent birds from using its solar array as a toilet, and a satellite positioning device that sends a message to a mobile phone if it moves outside a pre-set “geofence” (a set distance away from a hard-coded GPS point).

These floating cones are known as fish aggregation devices, or FADs. They’re designed to attract small fish, which in turn attract bigger pelagic fish – mainly kingfish, but maybe also smaller tuna and even possibly mahi-mahi – target species the serious recreational fishers covet.

Hopes are high this trial will work; FADs have never been deployed on ths part of the coastline before.

The aim of the devices is to stack the odds of finding, and catching, a trophy sports fish. They’ve also been rolled out in Western Australia, NSW and more recently, Queensland.

The FADs we’re deploying today off Lorne will stand about a metre high in the water. Underneath the 800mm-thick base of the cone-shaped buoy is a few metres of heavy chain with other lengths of smaller chain attached that will move around with the motion of waves and current, and flash in the water to attract the gamefish.

Below that is about 30 metres of “sinking” line that will hang vertically in the water. Then there is another 60-odd metres of floating line that will arc in the water and act like a shock absorber to cancel out the pull of the waves rolling in straight from the Antarctic via the Southern Ocean. Holding it all to the seabed is a large Sacra anchor that looks more at home on a 100-foot motor cruiser than, well, basically what’s a giant float on a bit of heavy string.

On the way to our marked positions where big fish have been caught – one is a reef off Aireys Inlet, the other is a small bommie east of Lorne – we stop off at another project, an artificial reef installed about four kilometres off Fishermans Beach at Torquay.

The Torquay offshore artificial reef is made up of 25 large box-shaped concrete structures dropped onto the seabed in clusters of five, each weighing around 20 tonnes. For the last three summers, each cluster has had a fixed FAD attached, although they use cylinder-shaped buoys rather than cones.

We take a moment to slow the VFA cat and check the condition of the fixed FADs, installed by divers about a month earlier. They appear to be working. The fishfinder is a blaze of colour as the transponder picks up large bait balls swirling under each of the floating cylinders. Several strong arches – likely bigger fish feeding – sit low and off to each side.

The wind has picked up; the calm conditions now replaced with a dirty chop as the building northerly blowing off the shoreline and swell bouncing off the coast combine with the incoming waves. We head into Lorne to pick up two passengers, Lorne Aquatic and Angling Club commodore Keith Miller and experienced club fisherman Ric Addison. Both have been instrumental in helping the VFA identify where the FADs were likely to work best.

Conditions at the beach-based launching ramp look messy, so the 4.0-tonne cat, its nose bouncing in the confused swell, carefully stands off a ladder descending the tall Lorne pier as the pair climbs down, waits for the right wave, and boards.

Passing a school of dolphins, we head out to the first site – the low bommie – where FAD 6 will spend the next five months. All the FADs are temporary, coming out of the water in May so they don’t become hazards to passing ships and migrating whales over winter when wind and waves grow in strength and fishing enthusiasm wanes. Once the summer of 2020 rolls around, they’ll go back in the water.

Before we can set the first FAD, VFA senior research scientist Paul Hamer, who will lay the devices, needs to check what the bottom looks like to ensure the GPS-marked position will take the anchor. A weighted video camera dropped into about 28 metres of water shows a combination of rock, shell and sand – perfect to help the anchor to take hold.

The FAD is dropped into the water downwind of where the anchor will sit on the bottom. As the cat moves slowly away, the line and flaked chain is fed out through the dive door. Once the boat is hovering over the marked position, the heavy anchor is dropped over the side.

FAD 6 is now deployed. After adding a little more weight to the chain to help the cone stand upright, its position is marked on the chartplotter, 5.2 kilometres from the Lorne boat ramp and 3.0 kilometres from the coastline.

On to FAD 7, which will be deployed in 40 meters of water 5.5 kilometres off Aireys Inlet on the edge of a natural reef. Again, the camera is dropped to the bottom where it shows a mix of rock, shell, algae and sand.

Both FADs also have a fish receiver cable-tied to the sinking line, a small cylindrical device about the size of a drink bottle. This will monitor the water for up to 400 metres around the FAD to detect if any fish tagged with transmitters, known as "acoustic tags", pass by. Once the device is retrieved and its data downloaded, the technology is so precise that the VFA will be able to single out an individual tagged fish or even the odd shark. The data will help a number of studies throughout Australia.

The trial of the two new FADs are part of the second phase of Victoria’s Target One Million program aimed at getting more of the state’s residents out enjoying coastal and inland waterways.

“The beauty of these [anchor-set FADs] is that if they don’t work here, we can just pick them up and move them somewhere else,” Womersley says. “We can quite easily move these FADs east to Lakes Entrance or west to Portland and see how they go there.”

FAD 7 is finally set into the water off Aireys Inlet. With a bit of extra weight on the chain, it instantly sits upright. The weather is now on our side, the Southern Ocean now a gentle swell as the FAD’s position is marked. A cloud of small bush flies, midges and even butterflies swirl around the boat, blown offshore by the earlier strong wind. The boat is the only place they can land.

We head back into Lorne to drop off Keith and Ric, both now keen to update the club’s 900-strong membership (surprising given that Lorne has only 600 residents) with the news, and location, of the two new FADs. Five kingies were caught in the water last year around where FAD 6 is located, with Keith saying it was the first time in the club’s history they’d been recorded off Lorne. The unexpected catch came as such a surprise to the club that it had to change the rules of its annual fishing competitions so kingfish will now count in the fish-score tally.

The run home to Queenscliff is a lot calmer over almost glassed-out water. We’re surprised to see numerous large strips of bright pink algae, up to a kilometre long, floating on the ocean surface and running parallel to the shoreline. Stopping for a closer look, we can see jellyfish, small white dots of plankton, and even tiny fingerlings swirling in the waters around and below it. “Whales would love scooping that up,” Hamer says.

We hit The Rip just on ebb tide, the water’s surface looking like a moonscape of still and swirling water as we pass over the canyon that was once the mouth of the Yarra River. Looking back, our wake zigzags across the surface of the water even though we’re steering dead ahead – even when calm this stretch of water has hidden power.

Womersley is happy with how the day has worked out. The plan was to have these FADs in the water weeks earlier, but a run of less than ideal weather has delayed their arrival.

Job done, the VFA’s big cat is pulled out of the water on its trailer. In five months’ time it will make the return trip to pull the FADs out of the water for the winter. Until then, the Lorne-based fishing club aims for this season to be remembered as the year of the kingfish.