West Side Story

Getting an invite to go sportsfishing for a week or two is pretty cool. It's even cooler when the invite comes from Western Australia!

It was February when Peter Montague of Fishwest Lures in Geraldton, WA, asked fellow Kiwi Bill Hohepa and myself to come visit. As you can imagine, we leapt at the chance to look at some of Australia's most rugged coastline.

We arrived in Perth in late May, picked up our car and started the 'short' six hour drive north to Geraldton.

Next morning we met up with Peter and we were off again - this time a slightly longer drive: an 11 hour haul up to Karratha in Northern WA. After a few hours, the cries of "Ooh! Look! An Emu!" and "Look! There's Skippy!" began to wind down a little. After ten hours, we were glad to be nearing the home of our host in Karratha, Alan Patzak.

Alan, or 'Patzie', as he is better known, is the operator of the local fishing charter business in Karratha: Tidal Zone Charters. After a good night's sleep, we were able to have a chat with him about his plans for the fishing to follow. Patzie is something of a WA fishing celebrity, winning prizes in some of Australia's top barramundi contests, and I for one was very keen to grapple with these quintessential Aussie sportsfish. However, being out of season, the barras will have to wait till next trip. Patzie advised us that we'd have to settle for catching the host of line-burning pelagics that the area has on offer... Darn!

FISH, LURES AND VIDEOTAPE
Prior to heading to sea, I had a chance to have a really good look at Alan's boat. Designed as an inshore sportsfisher, the spanking new Quintrex Ocean River is ideal for two anglers and a guide, with a ton of room forward for casting lures from a raised casting platform.

This was important, as one mission on this trip was to give Pete's Fishwest Pencil Poppers and small skirted lures a thorough workout around the local reefs and islands. Another mission was to get footage for a couple of TV shows and a video of WA fishing... A choice assignment, eh? GTs (giant trevally) were our main target, but queenfish, or any of the other tropical species, were all on my priority list.

We launched from the Dampier boat ramps, around 15 minutes drive from Karratha. Bill and his camera crew were in an accompanying Hire Boat, a 21ft SeaQuest plate alloy boat from Steve Carman Marine.

Once launched and aboard, I was immediately impressed by the stability of Patzie's 6m Quintrex. I was able to walk around freely on the raised casting deck, and there was heaps of storage room for the assorted lure boxes and camera bags... All up, I liked this set-up. Once we got under way, I liked it even more!

Powered by a Yamaha F100 four-stroke, Patzie's boat was quickly up on the plane and hooting across the water. With the three of us (Patzie, Pete and myself) in upholstered seats behind the aft-mounted console, the ride was dry and very smooth.

MANGROVE MASSACRE
Before long, we were working Pete's poppers around the islands and rocky outcrops along Flying Foam Passage, while Bill was filming our attempts at keeping them out of the mangroves - yeah, so I plucked a few leaves, who's counting? After finally despairing at my ability to find every leaf and twig on these islands, Patzie finally broke: "All right, enough! Let's try Legendre Island, there are no trees there at all!" As we cruised westward to Legendre, I'm sure a collective sigh went up from the remaining unplucked mangroves in Flying Foam Passage.

No trees was right. I had just come from three weeks in the Solomon Islands, one of the lushest, most beautiful tropical island paradises you could ever imagine. Northern WA offered a stark contrast, indeed.

The scenery here is amazing. Brown and red granite is washed by the deep blue hues of the Indian Ocean. Away from the constant spray of salt, the islands are clad only in a close-packed covering of spinifex grass, each blade of which ended in a needle point.

Between the rocky outcrops, long sandy beaches looked enticing, but just below the surface we could see the acres of coral and shattered granite that would make landing there all but impossible. This was a landform totally alien to this Kiwi lad used to green pastures and bush. Absolutely awesome!

SILVER BULLETS
However devoid of life these bleak islands were, the sea proved to be packed with fish! I finally bagged my first decent queenfish when we entered a small bay on the southwestern end of Legendre Island. Here, in water only about 6m deep, there seemed to be queenfish and trevally in huge numbers. From the first casts, our poppers were getting hammered.

The queenfish were the most aggressive and predominant species. These aerobatic speedsters climbed all over each other to nail our offerings, and once hooked, they proceeded to throw themselves all over the bay in twisting leaps and runs. I was using 20lb Fireline on a new TiCA Taurus reel matched to one of Pete's Signature Series carbon-fibre rods, an 8kg beauty loaded with all the fruit such as a leather-bound grip and gold-cermet guides. This relatively light gear was giving me a load of fun with these silver bullets.

TROPICAL THUGS
Scattered among the leaping queenies, we soon came up against those tropical thugs, the giant trevally. These were an entirely different kettle of fish, pardon the pun. Whereas the queenfish chased along behind the lures, nipping at them until one hooked up, the GTs were totally different. No namby-pamby nipping for these bruisers - you would see a broad grey-backed trevally swing in behind a lure, then in a surge they would nail it good and hard. Alternatively, the popper would just disappear in a swirl of foam as the big fish struck from below.

The pencil poppers worked extremely well on a huge range of fish. These lures are made of clear or lightly-coloured epoxy over a stainless steel body with holographic inserts and have the flash and shimmer, as well as the basic shape, of a garfish.

With the look and the splash of a panicked baitfish, they certainly rang all the right bells for a large variety of fish, including several trevallies, coral trout, red bass, shark mackerel and even a couple of sailfish took a liking to the hard-bodied offerings.

My biggest buzz for the trip, though, was a hefty shark mackerel, which after hitting a popper in the white water zapped hither and yon across the sea. Other speedsters to make the Taurus sing were a 10kg kawa kawa and a mid-sized Spanish mackerel, both taken trolling with Pete's Mackerel Express skirted lures.

Seeing the spool of a spinning reel about to enter warp-speed as these pelagics ripped off 200m of line in just a few seconds was a blast. I was impressed that such a small reel could handle this abuse.

After several days of super-productive and fun fishing, we finally had to leave Patzie and Karratha behind and head south to Shark Bay, but that's another story.

All up, we had a dynamite trip, both the fishing and the sightseeing was fantastic. The folks in WA have a virginal fishery, relatively untouched by population or commercial exploitation, and man, does it show!