Every Easter a group of us head down to Paradise Valley for a camping trip. It is so refined now that we take a kitchen sink. It really does make the dishes easier to do. Anyway this trip has been going on before I was born, I really look forward to it each year.
This might be the last year, though we have been saying that for a while. The people who own it are getting older and having trouble putting it on. And so it goes.
Got down there Thursday a bit later than we planned. Claire and I put there tent up and we were right on the river.
Friday & Saturday were gloriously sunny days, we made the most of it. I went for a swim each day except Thursday, which is really rare. Although when we were kids we used to swim for hours at a time, never getting colder.
Very happy after the Kangaroos had a win!
Otherwise it is a lot of food, beers and laughs. “What is like a sheep but black and white” Claire asked in a game of articulate. The answer is cow of course. These are always the longest and most fun trips, but the hardest to write about. The weather really made this trip, it was the first since I moved back to Melbourne. Definitely a lot of fun. Hope we get to do it again.
So I have officially moved to Victoria. We had a few days off so we asked my parents what their plans were. They were camping at Lake Tyres for several nights, so we decided to head down. I even managed to get my sister and her partner down as well, it was sort of an impromptu family camping trip.
We got down there Saturday and set up. Quite an amusing moment when we realised that we had never set up the outer on our tent before! You don’t really need it when camping in the dry season of Kakadu. Summer in Victoria is a bit different, you never know when it might rain. I have to say the tent looked rather new.
Had some fun on the beach the first day. It has been a long time since I have swum in the surf, something I really love. It was great to be among the waves again.
The next day Dad and I decided to do some land based fishing in the hopes of getting a flathead or two. He used bait, I tried my smaller soft plastics. He got a few bites, but we didn’t get anything. It was a shame we didn’t have more time, as we mostly spent it driving around and finding a few really cool locations.
This was back in April of 2011 and I lived in Airlie Beach. We had had a particularly heavy wet season, and for the first time ever Peter Faust dam had started to overflow. People were going up there to look at it, sort of a semi-tourist attraction. But word quickly filtered around that all the barra, were getting swept over the top of the dam, rumor had it that if you could get to the bottom you would be in for an epic session.
Up until then I was mostly a dead bait and reef fisherman, I had never caught a barra. So me and my mate Tony decided to head there. Sounded simple, but it was a last minute decision, we only had a few hours, and we forgot a few things. And when we got there we found out that most of it was locked behind barbwire fences. We found a route down that never said “do not trespass” so we figured if we weren’t crossing any restricted areas we would be okay.
We got down there to discover we didn’t bring:
– Suncream
– A landing net, fish grippers, or anything that might make getting barra from a very steep incline easier
– A tape measure
– An esky (we assumed all the fish would be inedible)
We brought the camera and some rods and that was about it.
Tony hooked a barra with his second cast. He got about three before I got my first one. I would be interested to know what people thought about eating it… it is fairly silver, and to me, looks edible.
I got three in total, Tony got about 7.
But the story of the day was the big girl that Tony hooked. He took my pliers and made an indent on his rod, and later measured it to be 137cm. Here is the snap I took, with a normal canon powershot d10 camera (no photoshop or fancy lenses or anything)
Most of the barra had marks on them from the damage they had taken going down the concrete dam. Right at the end of the day, I hooked a horse of my own. I fought it for a while, but it managed to get my line tangled in some trees with a clever jump. Tony climbed the tree to get it untangled, even fell in the water. However the line must have become worn on the wood, and it broke soon afterwards. This (and more) was captured on Tony’s go-pro:
So what happened after that? Well I wanted to go back, but I found out later that you weren’t allowed anywhere there. Security had stopped warning fisherman and started prosecuting them. But the main reason I never went back was because of this: Queensland Rocked By Earthquake
We didn’t think much of it at the time, but we were literally at the bottom of a dam when an earthquake hit.
So I decided to be thankful for what I had, not venture down there again, and just have a memory of a 2 hour barra session that likely won’t be repeated.
