Some fish and Eskimo rolls

My ADSL Modem/Router decided to die a few days ago so I haven’t been able to log the past weekend activities. I’m borrowing an ADSL modem kindly lent out by the Connolly family until mine is fixed.

On the weekend John visited after doing some work at the British Consular Agency in Brisbane. On Saturday morning we got up at 5:15am to do some fishing. We caught some live bait to catch some serious fish. We fished the Broadwater initially but with little action decided to try our luck out off the Seaway.  I didn’t take too long before we had some action. I caught two spotted Mackerel and a small shovelnose shark. John had a few live baits smashed and his hook bitten off but nothing to show for it. I got another good hook up and offered the rod to John to bring the fish in but he wasn’t keen to take the rod off me. After some friendly squabble as to who was going to bring the fish in I put the rod in John’s hand and told him to bring it in. Seconds later, the line broke and the fish of the day had got away. John just didn’t have any luck.

I always say that fishing it not just about catching fish but more an adventure and we had some other interesting events in the day. We saw a Westpac rescue helicopter doing a rescue drill not too far from us. Actually, it was right near where we started our drifts. When it was winching a person out of the water I moved us back to the start of our drift and the helicopter drifted a little towards us, at one stage it was almost over the top of us, probably no more than 15 metres. John’s cap flew of his head into the water and we copped a spray off the water. We also saw a Sea Eagle dive down and take one of our dead live baits out of the water. And to top it all off, back at the boat ramp we watched an old guy and his mate make a total mess of reversing their boat trailer down the boat ramp. The ramp was very busy with several other boats waiting to come in or go out. All of us watched the comic routine in disbelief. The boat was appropriately named “Double Trouble”.

John and I tried our luck again on Sunday morning, once again getting up at 5:15am but a northerly wind made conditions not as pleasant as the day before. John caught a small flathead which was well and truly legal to keep but we decided to give it another chance in life, and released it back into the water. John flew home to Canberra later in the afternoon.

Monday was the Labour Day public holiday in Queensland. We played some tennis in the morning and later in the afternoon went down to the Broadwater park. The kids rode their bikes and I tried to work out how to do Eskimo rolls on my wave ski in the calm water. It was quite daunting rolling over the first time strapped to my wave ski with a quick release belt. I just didn’t know what to expect when I rolled over. I dreaded the idea of getting a lot of water up my nose. It was also a little embarrassing because there were quite a few people sitting around the shoreline that would have been watching. I wasn’t too concerned about how hopeless I would have looked; I just didn’t want someone to think I was drowning. With every attempted roll I felt more relaxed with being trapped under the water and I tried different things. I was getting close to rolling back up out of the water but I just couldn’t get it. Then after probably around 30 attempts I finally did it. It surprised me how easy it was. I kept trying again and again until I could do it fairly consistently. After more than an hour of struggling in the water I felt tired but my back was fine. So I’m looking forward to working on it some more before finally trying it in the surf.

This evening I picked up Krysti, MJ and Jessica from Brisbane airport. They are going to be staying for nearly two weeks. Everyone was quite happy to see each other, particularly the kids.