Words by Seychelles and Africa Program Director Alec Gerbec
I have just returned from a trip that I hosted to the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia with East Coast Angling. This trip was a 10 night, 9 day expedition aboard the 85-foot MV Savannah Mothership with 6 experienced saltwater anglers, where we traveled and fished over 300 miles of this pristine wilderness. We started our journey in Cairns and sailed north to Lizard Island before starting our first day of fishing. Through the next 9 days we continued north where we eventually ended in the Lochart River zone.
As you may know, Australia is not my focus at Yellow Dog, and I am usually focusing my efforts on everything we offer in Africa and the Indian Ocean. This trip came to me as an opportunity because we are interested in further exploring this region and my traditional clientele were great candidates for this expedition-type trip since they are well traveled. Needless to say, I was very quick to jump on this opportunity as a trip to the Great Barrier Reef has always been a dream of mine since I was a kid. I was very excited to get the opportunity to fish to many of the species I really enjoy like GT’s and Indo-Pacific permit, but there were also some species that I had never encountered before like the Blue Bastard that further pushed me over the edge to take advantage of the trip.
I was very fortunate to put together a great group of Yellow Dog anglers who all spent time in front of a majority of the fish we were targeting, and I couldn't have been any more fortunate on how the group dynamics went. I will say it again throughout this report, but a serious tip of the hat to Nick Milford and his crew at East Coast Angling as they provided us with a top-notch experience, and their hospitality will be hard to match.
Trip Summary
The point of origin of my travels to Australia started in Bozeman where I flew through Salt Lake before carrying onto San Francisco to catch my international flight. There are a couple of airlines you can choose from to make the big journey, and I decided to go with Qantas as I have never flown with them before and have heard good things about their service. The trip from San Francisco to Sydney was about 16 hours and it was very comfortable (even for those of us that fly in economy). The only discomfort with this airline was the rates they charged for checked luggage as they were quite dramatic for each bag added to your reservation. Once I landed in Sydney, I had a couple of hours to find my way through customs and onto the domestic terminal. This airport is the type of design where it will require you to hop on a shuttle bus to get to a different terminal, but it was easy enough to navigate.
If you have ever run into some of the random late-night cable TV shows like Australia Border Control, it certainly crosses your mind as you are filling out your entry forms and traveling through their customs lines over there. Upon your final approach to Australia, you will be watching a customs video where they state, “if you are not sure, just declare it or you might pay a hefty fine.” What I will say being someone who travels with lots of natural materials tied into my flies and boots that have been in other saltwater environments, is that they are happy to hear your side of the story and will most likely let it come through without issue. Something you should also know is that Australia does not allow you to carry on rods and reels onto the plane, and you will have to check these items. Overall, it was a positive and quick process to make my way through customs, and my precious bucktail flies had made it to my final destination.
Upon landing in Cairns (pronounced “Cans” by the locals), we were greeted with warm coastal air and lots of happy faces who were about to embark on their vacation. Cairns certainly is a popular city to visit as a tourist as it is a kickoff place for many great adventures in all directions. After collecting the bags, it was easy to schedule an Uber to our accommodations which took about 15 minutes to drive to. We chose the Cairns Hilton since it was located on the popular end of town, right on the water and near all the good restaurants. The amenities were very nice with a pretty impressive breakfast offering as well, and then the restaurants in the surrounding area were awesome as far as what was available to consider. Australian cuisine in Cairns was quite worldly where you could certainly take advantage of the local seafood or track down something unique like South African style food. They take great pride in their ingredients; this city had many similarities to parts of California where there were locally sourced foods and lots of diversity in the offerings.
From Cairns, our original itinerary was to hop onto a charter flight and travel north to Lockhart River but due to some mechanical problems with the mothership, we had to set sail from Cairns and travel north to Lizard Island before we started our fishing. After sailing through the night, we arrived at Lizard Island the next day and started to get our gear together for the days to come on the water. Lizard Island has a rich history that dates back to the day Captain Cook explored these waters and got stuck inside the Great Barrier Reef with his ship before finding Lizard Island so that he could climb to the top of the mountain (Cook’s Look) and see a route back out to deeper waters. Nowadays, Lizard Island is famed for being a kickoff point to one of the better Marlin fisheries in the world.
As we were preparing for our first day on the flats, it was interesting to learn more about the reef management that has been implemented for all anglers, so that they can preserve this vast marine wilderness. The government has established a set of categories that they assign to each shallow water section of the reef according to the latest data collection that they have analyzed. From this, they determine whether you can fish an area, or if you can even enter it with your boat without fishing at all. There is quite a bit more information to provide on this but to keep this about my trip, I will leave it here. With this in mind, we had to navigate the different zones that were open to recreational fishing, so our first day was on a flat just southwest of Lizard Island called Martin Reef.
This was probably our crumbiest day of weather for the whole trip where we were met with cloudy weather and a consistent wind out of the southeast. At the first site of the flats, they very closely mimicked the consistency of what you expect to find in the Seychelles, where there is bright white sand, turtle grass, and broken coral areas. One of the main areas of focus that we learned about from Nick Milford was described as “rubble.” This is where the sand was just starting to meet bigger clumps of broken coral and where the blue bastards most frequently fed. Since none of us had ever laid eyes on a blue bastard before, we all fanned out amongst the rubble in hopes that we would be the first ones to encounter one. While I didn't get to see one this day, a couple of the guys did have chances at them, but there were quite a few other species on the flats milling around that would spook from us wading, and in turn, push the bastards off the flats.
Interestingly enough, there were hundreds of milkfish feeding on the flats on this day and I had no idea that we would have a chance at seeing this species on our trip. This being one of my favorite species to target, I quickly rigged myself up with a fly that was tied by Wayne Haselau that was specifically designed for fishing them on the flats and quickly converted one to hand! What's funny about this though is that I had not packed a single milkfish fly into my box but thankfully one of my fishing partners for the day had visited the Seychelles years ago and had these secret weapons from the milkfish man himself. Wayne has a lot of very interesting theories on the milkfish and their diets, and he is one of the pioneers of creating the technique to catch these fish on a fly. Essentially this fly was designed for milks in shallow water during the low tide that are pecking away on spirulina patches on the sand. Wayne also believes that milkfish would often eat polychaetes which is a type of aquatic worm that is commonly found on the flats. He created the egg-sucking leech of the saltwater where the fly was a combination of a worm and seaweed, and it also had some barbell eyes to get it in position quickly and a foam butt so that the fly would stand on its head. What was wild to me was that my fishing buddy on this day of all days, had these prototypes that are not something many anglers have seen! The sun shined down on me this day and I couldn't believe it all came together, and I was able to land one. Overall, we had a fun first day getting our feet wet and orienting ourselves to the flats. One of the guys also was able to catch a titan triggerfish which was also a welcomed surprise to the menu of targets for the trip.
We decided to move further north in the coming days to find some more fertile ground and ended up in the Claremont Isles where we would fish the Pelican Island reef and Iris reef. During this portion of the trip we were moving into our strongest spring tides which allowed us to walk the islands when the waters were high looking for species like GTs and then once the water dropped into place, we were able to start wading the flats in hopes of bumping into blue bastards, Indo Pacific permit, and various other species. We somehow struck on here which was hard to believe but that's the name of the game when you are exploring waters that are rarely fished. The next day a couple of boats headed much further north while one decided to stay behind in the Claremont's and fish Magpie Reef. The boat that stayed behind was captained by the guide Charlie and his two anglers Chris and Keith, and they ended up having a huge day where each of them landed a blue bastard and Keith also added a permit to his day too! This was a great second day on the flats and helped motivate everyone for the next couple of days when we could still wade the flats. Some more permit were landed and we were starting to rack up quite a few interesting species like the harry hot lips and many of the lesser trevallies like the bluefin, golden, gold spot, and brassie.
As the tides slowed down, we were able to incorporate the trolling motors more, and this opened quite a few options for us. Since the boats were center consoles, they were not designed to be poled like a skiff, and these trolling motors allowed us to get up on the flats. It was common to find blue bastard happily feeding in deep water and having the opportunity to target larger GTs that were searching for their next meal. This proved to be the most effective way to target the blue bastards as the deeper water would keep them comfortable while we fish to them, and they would not be easily spooked. Once we wore out the flats and had some time to kill, it was always fun to break out the teasing rod and see what could rise off the coral bommies. We racked up everything from several types of trevally and cod (what we call grouper), to queenfish and snapper. On a couple of the days, we were also able to run into these huge bait balls in deeper water that had hundreds of birds diving into them. This attracted a lot of different fish and reminded me of something you would see on the East Coast while fishing for striped bass. It was no problem for all the boats to pull up to this scenario at the same time and pull on some fish, it was just difficult for us to make our fly look better than the thousands of baitfish that were present. Some really nice-sized brassie trevally, queenfish, and bonito were caught, this was a great way to finish off a day.
The last couple of days we found ourselves north of Lockhart River where we were now fishing much closer to mainland Australia. What was interesting about this is that we were now encountering fish that we had not seen all trip like the Anak permit. While we didn't get to convert one of these beauties, it was just a testament that around every corner there was something new to consider. My thoughts were the freshwater influences from rivers as well as mangrove estuaries were to attribute to this. These finals days we had some great fishing where several blue bastards and Indo-Pacific permit were caught, as well as some very large GTs breaking fly lines.
The expedition was a great success overall despite some slow days in the mix, but this was to be expected when fishing such a vast and diverse fishery. Our group’s final tally was 39 different fish species, and there were certainly a few more that managed to get off the line as well. This is a trip that I will never forget and it exceeded my expectations from an adventure standpoint. If you are the type of angler who likes to chase the unknown in saltwater, this trip is absolutely for you. I can’t thank East Coast Anglers enough for putting on such a good show.
