Travel

Travel is a popular subject in the festive season. Christmas holidays mean time off work, or time out of school, or just time away from too familiar haunts. Usually, Christmas holidays mean time to travel somewhere away from home.

My grandparents were ‘well-travelled’ for their generation, and their enthusiasm for travel was quite unusual for their day. Grandfather, an engineer, could recite reams of statistics about how far they had gone, how many time-zones they had crossed, how long each journey had taken, and other such clinical details. Grandmother, by contrast, had a different slant on things. She was a warm and generous home-maker tirelessly preoccupied with cultural nuances, and real-life details such as which fish sold first in the local markets, what were the locals gossipping about in idle topical conversation. Her eye caught such small details as the source of the warmth of the home hearth, the little habits of a pinch of fresh herbs snatched from a window box to make a pot-posy for a soup or stew, and the way even the poshest people in restaurants energetically sopped up the last of the gravy with a crust of bread. Grandmother got down to the nitty-gritty of things, and few details escaped her sharp eye. Both those people were travelling side by side along the same route, but travelling in entirely different ways.

Both those ‘oldies’ were keen anglers. Grandfather had the exact scientific ratio of line-strength to hook size, and retrieval speed to fish target species. Grandmother outwitted him most times because she had the insider’s local edge garnered by patient observation and recognition of what was before her eyes in terms of fish habitat.

It seems to me that many people unwittingly reduce the scope of their surroundings by travelling everywhere too fast. There are even packaged tours where pre-paid clients never step outside the sanitised enclosure of the package.

The wet season is a time when cheap fares are available to people willing to come to the Kimberley. Substantial saving can be made not only on the cost of getting there but also on the cost of accommodation. However, because the cyclone season is so unpredictable many charter boat operators (Geoff Foster on “Marlinfisher” works through the wet) take the option of moving south into more stable weather. Among anglers this tends to leave some people feeling they have been left high and dry, and a trifle miffed. Take heart! Change your definition of ‘travel,’ slow down and look around carefully.

There is an abundance of opportunities right at your fingertips. Left to your own devices, look around: study the local scene and allow yourself to become saturated in local detail. Start by getting a copy of the local tide chart. In Broome the tidal range is nine metres, or thirty feet, on spring tides. For the patient traveller, on foot, that means there are dozens of square kilometres of exposed beach, mudflats, creek entrances and reefs laid bare at low tide. What a feast of detail! Search out the significance of what is before your eyes in terms of where and when to cast a line.

Study the beachscape, note a few landmarks for higher tide times, and plan a strategy for how and where to place your bait or lure to its best advantage. Read the beach to learn where whiting are likely to be found as the water comes back in. Where will that be? Where they are most likely to find beach worms, for instance.

Watch other local signs, like birds. Oyster-catchers are common birds often disturbed by beach-combers. They rise up indignantly and call to each other as they relocate to another section of beach or rocks. What do oyster-catchers catch? Would you guess oysters! The birds will usually point out to the keen observer just which rock outcrops have colonies of oyster spat growing on them. As the birds feed at low tide they leave behind broken shell and fragments of shellfish which become the next meal for reef fish when the tide rises again. Into that natural burley trail is where a keen angler will place his baited hook.

Oyster spat is good habitat for small crabs, providing shelter in crevices. The prized table fish Bluebone, or blackspot tusk fish, regard crabs as a delicacy, so they, too, can be found around the same rocks as the tide returns.

At high-tide, birds such as tern and boobies will again show where the bait fish, like poddy mullet, sly-sly and yellowtail, are teeming in bait-balls, moving on the tidal flow. Larger fish like mackerel and wolf herring panic the baitfish, and can be persuaded to take a lure by mistake.

It seems that insects, birds and fish all understand weather patterns through some ancient wave-length of communication lost to sophisticated, modern man. Shortly before rain in the wet season javelin fish can be seen feeding along the creeks, where insects are ‘doing their thing’ in teeming millions. Cast your fly amongst them at that time of day.

If empty beaches are not your scene, perhaps you would prefer to scare yourself silly with a detailed study, on foot, of the mangrove forest at the entrance to Dampier Creek and Crab Creek at low tide. The quality of the daylight changes into a cooler colour matching the distinct drop in temperature beneath the canopy of the forest. Trunks and branches, as well as the sticky black mud are home for many shellfish, crabs and mangrove worms together with the odd sea snake. No wonder mangroves have the reputation of standing fast in a cyclone: their massive roots grow like buttresses tangled in a maze. To the most imaginative of travellers each mangrove root looks like the knobbly outline of a big snappy handbag snoozing in the mud! Luckily, crocodiles need lots of warmth to energise them into action. Anyway, they are so well suited to their backyard that you and I would most likely step on one before our eyes searched it out of its natural camouflage.

During the holidays people travel to places like Broome, yet their journey need not end, just because they have reached their destination. In fact their destination can be a beginning, a chance to unwind, slip into Broome time, adopt the ambling pace of snails and soak up the detail needed to learn to think like a fish, if fishing is your reason for coming.