Wednesday afternoon I packed the Landrover, hooked up the trailer with my Windrider 10 sailing kayak and by 8.30 PM I was on the road. The Spencer Gulf is the nearest salt water to Broken Hill and by 1 AM I had arrived at Port Davies boat ramp and jetty on the Broughton River, just south of Port Pirie. The tide had just peaked at 2.5 metres and I had the place to myself. Before long I was launched and had my line in the water.
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Drifting downstream on the run out tide I was bouncing lightly weighted Perch cut strip baits along the sandy bottom and before too long I got my first hookup. Landing a cranky Blue Swimmer Crab on a kayak into the space between my legs was interesting but after three or four more crabs I had the sytem worked out. I was netting them with my landing net and parking my tackle box on top of them for a couple of minutes till they settled down. Disentangling them once they stopped flipping and running all over the limited space was pretty easy then. The crabs went into a large dry bag filled with salt water and lashed to the mast support cross member in front of me.
Dawn saw the crabs increasing and before long I had a dozen aboard with a similar quantity of undersized and female blue swimmers disentangled from the net and released. I nearly jumped out of my skin when there was a loud "chuffing" noise behind me and I swung around to identify the source: A dolphin! He was sounding all around me for the next twenty minutes but sadly I was too slow on the shutter to catch a good shot of him. When the sun got properly up a nice breeze sprang up and I hoisted the sail and headed for the mouth of the river and into the gulf waters. I was trolling an eight inch stumpjumpa deep diving lure on my 12KG rod with the Penn reel loaded with 15KG braid. Not far past the channel markers and into the deeper gulf waters the lure got smashed and the reel was literally smoking with 250 metres of braid, along with the fish and lure disappearing into the blue depths at an alarming speed. I got spooled so fast it made my head hurt... Kingie or maybe a Tuna? Shark? Tying on a new big gulp minnow saw three more hours of fruitless trolling up and down the coast. Whatever it was it was a loner.
The wind got stronger and stronger and bait fishing the bottom was only netting me the odd Shittie (trumpeter). I reefed about half the sail around the mast and headed back across the nasty windswell and waves made by the outgoing tide at the river entrance. By this time it was mid afternoon and I was exhausted. The sail had torn along the luff seam in the raging winds at the river entrance and I was grumpy about that too. Wet, sunburned and tired I hit the ramp and packed the Windrider up on it's trailer and put the fish and crabs on ice. I drove a short distance up into the range and parked up under the first decent stand of shade trees and crashed out in the ute bunk bed for a well earned rest.
The next morning I headed up to Port Germain and took a walk out onto the 1.6KM jetty. Nobody was getting much at all there and the only exitement was the resident kingfish busting off my lures and livebait on the barnacle encrusted pier supports. An afternoon trip down to Port Broughton saw the wind at near gale force making the area unfishable. I camped up in the ranges again that night and had a nice feed of Crabs and brown rice fried with onions and soy sauce.
The next morning found me back on the water at Port Davies having a ball surface fishing for a great haul of Garfish while drifting downstream near the mouth of the river. I paddled back up to my newly purchased crab net every half hour or so and was getting a whole bunch of great Blue Swimmers collected. Nothing touched my trolled lures except the occasional bit of weed. That evening I went and fished the structure in Port Pirie Harbour and got bashed up and busted off by the resident kingies a few times. I really would have liked to land just one of these brawlers but I was not prepared to switch to 50KG mono and handlines which one old salt jetty fisho said was the best method to skull drag them out from the pier timbers. Seemed a bit unsporting to me...
Saturday it got pretty hot and it was a busy day with stink boaters everywhere I went. These Galahs of the water were roaring around and making a nuisance of themselves in general so I settled for some dozing and bank fishing in the shade of the mangroves on one of the Broughton river feeder creeks, with a few tommies caught and released. When the sun got down a bit I went and dropped my crab net off the pier up until sunset with 13 undersized crabs released and no keepers. At this stage I had 24 Garfish cleaned on Ice and 28 Blue Swimmers alongside them in the esky so I decided to hit the road and get home before they deteriorated. A few hours later I arrived back in a rainy Broken Hill. The Neighbors got a package of Gars and cooked crabs each and I slept for 13 hours straight.
