When the wind blows

It was the first day of a three-day trip to Flinders Island and the wind was roaring up from the Southern Ocean. Some of the gusts were strong enough to pluck the feathers from one of the wild turkeys that roam the island. This was anticipated. Before I left a friend told me: "Flinders Island is a great place for fishing, pristine waters and magic scenery, but they bottle the wind down that way."

So here I was, sitting on a rocky outcrop at the mouth of the North East River. With me were local fishing tour operator Jim Luddington (Flinders Island Adventures) and my regular fishing partner Richard Carr. As Jim pointed out earlier that morning, wind is less relevant when you are fishing on an island.

And so it was with Flinders. When the wind is a problem and you can't get offshore, there are miles of pristine beaches that also produce excellent fishing.

Flinders Island is the largest of the 52 islands that comprise the Furneaux Group. The islands run from the southern tip of Wilsons Promontory to the northeast tip of Tasmania.

It was a quiet day in piscatorial terms: one huge black stingray and little of anything else. But Jim said we would be able to get offshore the next day, so life could only get better. Meanwhile, we got to have a good look around the island and get some bearings.

Jim runs a 10m cat called Strait Lady out of the port of Lady Barron. It's a neat boat with heaps of fishing room. We ran across Adelaide Bay, past the infamous Pot Boil and then headed south towards the eastern point of Cape Barren Island. Our destination was Gull Island where Jim said there was a good chance of getting into some snook (shortfinned pike) with the fly.

Along the way is the wreck of a steel barquentine, the Farsund. The three masted vessel was driven ashore in a southeast gale in 1912. In her day she was 1980 tonnes and 233ft from stem to stern. Today the Farsund is a rusted hulk.

DUMB AND DUMBER
Snook always remind me of one of the strange quirks of fishing - the human obsession with ascribing our values and feelings to animals or, in this case, to fish. Associating human traits with animals is called anthropomorphism. Animal liberationists embellish alleged similarities between people and animals to lend credibility to their arguments. Anglers, who generally tend to rubbish the animal libbers, do the same thing.

There is no denying that we regard some fish as being smart and others dumb. It's a bit like life, I guess. To my way of thinking - in the anthropomorphic sense, of course - snook are dumb. Catching snook is easy when they are about, and they can be a lot of fun. Fishing isn't just about the fight in the fish, it is also about coaxing a fish to take a bait or lure.

COUTA COUNTERFEIT
Snook are similar in appearance to barracouta. The snout is a bit longer on the snook, and the colouring is olive on the back to white on the belly, whereas couta can be almost black on the back. Both fish are endowed with the canine-like teeth and big eyes that so often mark a predator.

The trait that is most noticeably different between the two species is the way they attack a lure or fly. Couta seem to anticipate where the counterfeit offering will be and jump ahead of it, while snook seem to attack where the lure or fly was, so that you end up deliberately slowing the retrieve to make the hook-up. Either way, both fish can be frustrating.

By no stretch of the imagination could you rate snook a test of your testosterone. They tug the line a bit more than a squid, but they are not built for speed or hard diving lunges and won't give you a heart attack, or even a serious adrenalin rush. Snook hunt in packs and are best sought around weedy areas in bays and estuaries, particularly along drop-offs where they hunt smaller fish.

At Gull Island the Strait Lady was positioned to take advantage of the wind and we drifted across a small bay close to a rock with a good wash. We dropped our flies - Lefty Deceiver patterns in yellow, blue and white - to the bottom and stripped them back with a slow, hesitant retrieve.

Attempts to eat the flies were often a reckless fumble and bumble. At one stage there was a double hook-up involving a slightly larger snook, so Jim put down his flyrod to take charge of the net, leaving the fly trailing in the water while he did it. As the hooked fish were brought to the surface, other members of the school came up and the trailing fly was hit. Luckily, Jim had little tension on the reel, so the rod didn't go overboard, but line was disappearing off the reel. So there was Jim netting the snook for my fishing partner while yours truly was left holding two flyrods with a fish on each.

GOING TO PIECES
As it turned out, the rod might as well have gone over the side. When I got Jim to pose for a photo with one of the snook, the boat rocked, and his two-piece flyrod, which was behind him leaning on the gunwale, was transformed into a three-piece unit.

The session went for as long as we wanted it to. It wasn't so much a matter of how many snook we wanted to catch, rather it was how long we wanted to keep on catching them for. A couple of hours of solid snook hook-ups and one broken flyrod later and Jim opted for a change of venue and species.

"I reckon we should go up to the Pot Boil and fish for school sharks and gummies," suggested Jim, adding a cautionary rider that "It might be a bit rugged, but it's fishable."

When you have fished enough different waters, your ears automatically prick up when someone suggests fishing water with an ominous sounding name. So it was with the Pot Boil. The wind at this time was in the southwest and blowing about 25kt - less than half the power of the previous day.

The Pot Boil is a series of channels and sandbars that Jim said was best fished on the last hour of the ebb and the slack water. The wind was pushing the tide, but when the tide changed to flood, the fishing would become difficult as the waves stood up against the wind.

We were drifting beam on to the sea, which meant the vessel was like a seesaw. The Pot Boil is an awesome stretch of water. On the shallow sandbars to the east, west and south of us, waves were lifting and crashing. Our first drift over 24m of water produced a 3.6kg of yank flathead for Richard.

"Not bad, well done," said Jim.

SCHOOL'S IN
The next drift and my rod buckled for a 17kg school shark that at times threatened to empty the reel of line. "Well done", said Jim as he netted the shark. He was concerned about our health, but it was a typical snapper day on Port Phillip we explained, so he was happy.

The next drift produced a 6kg gummy shark, and then we lost another school shark at the net fiddling around taking photos. By then our window of opportunity was over and it was time to think of a change before the tide, which has a 3m rise and fall here, started to churn up the sea and the pot started to boil over.

"I say we head in and make tracks for Red Bluff. The wind will be behind us and there could be a few salmon on the beach if we time our arrival right," said Jim.

And that's what we did. This time Jim's friend and business associate, Leigh Cox, was along. Leigh has his own charterboat Vanora and a cat that he works in with Jim.

At Red Bluff the beach stretches away to the south to Sellars Point. One bait and one salmon about 2kg came ashore for Jim. Lee managed three fish about the same size in three consecutive casts, and then Richard found it was flyfishing nirvana when he hooked up on the first two casts.

But the fishing didn't last. Heavy freshwater run-off slowly worked its way south along the beach and the salmon moved to more saline grounds.

"That was well done," said Jim.

The following morning it was out to Chapel Island with Lee to drop off some Telstra technicians before heading to a reef system on the west side of the island to bottom bounce for flathead.

Chapel Island is famous for its population of tiger snakes. Black reptiles that have evolved in a larger form than the mainland variety, the snakes live on mutton-birds. One of the Telstra techs was concerned about the snakes, so Lee comforted him with a few words of advice: "I don't know why you're wearing long pants, the snakes on the island will only shred them."

As for the trip: "Well done, Jim."