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Got a fishing story you'd like to share?
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 Corinella Chaos, from DoodsyFrom: Doodsy (formerly Dazza) Sometimes, in life, you have disagreements with people. Sometimes with your best mate. And me and my best mate Joey had something of a disagreement at the end of last year (2002). We didn't speak for a good 3 or 4 months. Now to make it worse, I worked with his girlfriend, but me and her were fine. Now I knew that they were going away to Portland for a week in March, but then on the Saturday afternoon when they were away, I get a text message from Mel (Mrs Joey) asking if I wanted to go fishing with my (former at this stage) best mate Joey!!! Now this surprised me somewhat for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because we hadn't spoken for the best part of 4 months!!! And secondly, well, my response to her was, "Well, Portland's a bit far mate!!!" But they were back in Melbourne, and I thought, "Yeah, we may as well patch things up." Problem was, Joey's boat was out of action because his motor had blown up a few months back, and I'd bought a new boat at a bargain price, knowing that the hull needed to be re-fibreglassed at some stage. I didn't know how soon it would have to be done though, and how bad the hull damage was, until I was out off Black Rock and decided to test out the bilge pump, which then spent the next 20 minutes pumping water out from my hull!!!!! The hull needed to be done straight away, so my "new" boat was also out of action. So, for our "kiss and make-up" fishing session, we were to go fishing in Joey's mate "Danny's" little tinny. So I ring up Joey and after initial awkwardness, we were talking fishing for half an hour just like nothing had ever happened. And eventually, we decided to go all the way to Corinella to chase these elephant sharks which had just started going berserko in Western Port. (Corinella's a long way from Point Cook/Altona Meadows.) Problem was, we'd never fished Corinella, and because we were cocky buggers we thought, "Yeah, what the hell, we'll go down there... tonight!!!" The wind forecast was 15-20 knot E/NE. A bit much, but we were going regardless. If, for no other reason, just to go fishing together and get things back to normal. So, out comes my marine atlas, and I'm studying the map of Corinella, and I see a couple of things we should be avoiding. One being "Snapper Rock". So, I rushed off to the newsagency, and made a photocopy of the map to bring with us. It took nearly 2 hours to get to Corinella, and it was just starting to get dark when we arrived. And it was pretty blowy too!!! But we were there and we were going out, no matter what!!! Now, anyone who's fished Western Port knows the tide goes like a rocket at full flow, and it was flying in, but just starting to slacken towards high water when we set off. It was pretty choppy. Being used to fishing Port Phillip, the first thing I noticed was the fact there were no lights on the shore. You could hardly see the shore in fact. A bit different to night-time fishing off St Kilda or Black Rock where there's a million lights on the shore. But we ploughed on, keeping betweeen the port and starboard lights ahead of us which marked the entrance to the Corinella channel. It was getting dark quickly when we got out of the channel, and it was pretty windy and uncomfortable. So we looked at the map and decided to head in close to French Island. The idea was to go around "Snapper Rock" and get round the back of it. But it was high tide and Snapper Rock was nowhere to be seen. However, there was a flashing pile light on it, so we headed for that. Don't forget we hadn't fished here before, and we had no idea how big this "Snapper Rock" was, and how it was only just covered at high tide. So we get closer to this pole and it's pretty dark, but I could still see that the water was chopping up severely around this pole while it was a lot flatter out from it. What did this mean? That just under the water, was something making the water appear this way. So I'm yelling to Joey, "Head away from it. Away. This way." And Joey's shouting, "No way! It looks too shallow over there!!!" We were pretty worried by this stage. And it wasn't even our boat remember. So Joey's manouevering the boat around (it's a rear-steer), trying to get away from this choppy water, but the tide was still strong enough to take us right into it, and I nearly cried when I looked over the side and saw solid rock about 10cm under the boat. And before you know it, there's a horrible "CRUNCH" sound as prop hit rock. And again. And again. Eventually, we got away from there and promptly decided to head back in straight away without wetting a line. It was dark, windy, and we didn't know what the hell we were doing, and we were pretty sure the motor now had half a prop. So back in we go, in the boat which neither of us owned, and hauled it back onto the trailer, to find that the prop was, in fact, buggered. But we were seriously just happy to be back on land at that stage. The $200 or whatever it would cost to fix or replace the prop was not an issue right there and then. The worst part was that I felt like a bit of a dick having come all the way down to Corinella on a whim, being the over-confident cocky bastards that we were, thinking that we could fish a really tricky, and unknown area to us, in the dark. And stuffed up another boat in doing so. So that was 3 boats out of action. We texted Joey's mate Danny. He wasn't amused. So we drove all the way home and that was our trip to Corinella. But I wasn't done. About a week later, my boat was ready and seaworthy. So, I was gonna go back to Corinella, in the daylight, and try again. I took a day off work, as did my mate Kotchy, and we got to Corinella at about 8.30am. I think my old Commodore used an entire tank of petrol just getting there! Worse to come. I backed down the ramp, no probs. The problem was that the battery was as flat as a tack. What to do? So, I started the car, popped the bonnet, and took out the car battery, leaving my old VL running off the alternator, while Kotchy used my car battery to start the boat motor. And of course, we had to take it out with us, so I drove up the hill and parked car and trailer miles away in the grass car-park up the hill. This time it was low tide as we headed out of Corinella channel, and daylight, and when I saw just how big this "Snapper Rock" was at low tide, I couldn't believe it. It was like Mount Buller!!! Bloody huge. And this was the thing we had nearly wrecked Danny's boat on just a week or so earlier. Did I feel like a nothing. This time, we stayed WELL clear of that monstrosity. And we caught quite a few elephant sharks too, which made it all worthwhile. But every time I looked over to Snapper Rock, I just felt like such a tool, that we had been so naive. But you live and you learn. When we got back to the ramp, we left the boat running, took the battery out and I carried the damn thing up the hill, back to the car, put it in, started the car, backed up and Kotchy drove her up onto the trailer. Stopped the motor, and then realised he hadn't tilted the motor. I can't type what I screamed at that point, but it was something like, "Oh my. That's a bit of a bugger". Actually it was nothing like that. Much more explicit. So we put the flat battery back in and, thankfully, it had just enough power to work the electric tilt. It took about 5 minutes to tilt it I think. Comical. We fished Warneet and Tooradin every weekend through March and April after that, because it was much closer than Corinella. And there was "Eagle Rock" and "Crawfish Rock" around there, which I made sure I went nowhere near!!! Crawfish Rock especially was submerged completely at high tide, but seemed to be as big as the MCG at low water. But we caught something like 15 different species fishing around there. It was fantastic. I fell in love with Western Port, but boy did I learn to be careful and not so cocky when fishing it. Bring on the next "Elephant" season!!!! (For another tragic yet amusing Western Port story, see another "Fishy Tale" by myself, added a couple of years back, titled "The day we really did have to get out and push!") (27 August 2003) |
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