Got Fathers Day sorted? Give him something that he will be stoked with this year! Salt of the Sea – Tales from Commercial Fishermen is a 128 page, coffee table style book with a handmade hard cover, full gloss pages and full colour photos. Only 1500 Limited Collector’s Editions have been printed and they are available for $75 each from Commercial Fishing Supplies. Email dave@commercialfishingsupplies Web commercialfishingsupplies Tel 0754388458 This is part of a memoir from Bruce Davis, written in July 1995 that appears in Salt of the Sea. “We spend seven and a half months of each year at sea here in the Torres Straits, a shallow stretch of water that separates Cape York, the northern most point of Australia, from Papua New Guinea. The Straits are dotted with about 30 islands and numerous reefs and is about 100 miles across. Here, we have the best fishing in the world! Our vessel Maggie Jo is 65 feet long, 20 feet wide with a draft of 11 feet. It weighs 130 tons and steams at nine knots. We trawl using two by four and a half ton winches which carry 4000 feet of 14 millimetre trawl wire. The wheelhouse contains $100,000 worth of marine electronics. The plotter, GPS receivers and sonar all have complex computers. On two of my computer screens positioned just on the PNG side of the border, I have an image of a big Papuan warrior with spear raised. I delight in trawling over the top of him when the Fisheries and Boating Patrol is not around. Our sonar scans the bottom up to 800 feet forward of the vessel, which allows us to navigate around reefs and foul ground. We can watch our gear trawl past the rocks. The entire hauling and setting procedure takes only about eight to ten minutes because our gear is very efficient. We can change a net in any sea conditions within ten minutes. We tow two nets on each side measuring five fathoms each. Our trawl blocks are 78 feet apart. We use a two fathom tri-net, which we winch up electrically every 12 to 24 minutes so that we can monitor the catch in the main nets and stay upon the most productive grounds. We catch four types of prawns in the Straits – 25 per cent tigers, 65 per cent endeavour, five per cent king and five per cent coral prawns. We also catch bugs, squid, cuttlefish and some fish. Occasionally we trawl up crayfish, sometimes up to 1000 per night but they are reserved for the Islanders and we are supposed to throw them over the side as shark feed. We are constantly being searched by Fisheries for crayfish – I reckon that each year the Torres Straits fishing fleet feeds the sharks about three million dollars’ worth of prime export crayfish. Today we anchored at Stephens Island. I had been on duty all night keeping a sharp lookout on the radar because I was poaching PNG fuzzy wuzzy prawns. If you give them a quick haircut and remove the pig’s tusk from their nose, they look just the same as Aussie prawns! On August sixth we will spend the night on Stephens Island for the annual big island feast. We will eat until midnight and dance until dawn. We light a big fire over a heap of rocks and then extinguish the fire and the rocks are used as our native oven, in which a big turtle and a pig will slow-bake. Lots of vegetables wrapped in alfoil and damper wrapped in coconut leaves will be served, along with all manner of salads, fish, rice, coconut cakes and puddings. I will dress in my pink lap lap, which has been elaborately crocheted with a two inch border of gold. I will wear this proudly along with my Islander sandals and ribbons around my ankles. I will dance with the Islanders, jumping up and down to the rhythm of their drums. I hope you enjoyed reading about some of the insights regarding our lifestyle and fishing operations in a remote area of this great country.”
Posted on: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 00:01:20 +0000
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