From Turnbull Bay to the East (Part 1)

The tides from the 19th of July looked great and a cold front was moving through the Bight. The weather was looking good for a session at Bynoe. I picked Craig Magill up from the airport and we prepared everything for an early start on Saturday and off we went. For those that don't know, you can drive right into Turnbull bay. The track is off the old Bynoe access road off Cox Peninsula Rd and it's pretty rough. At roughly 20km, towing a tinny takes about an hour and a half.
Twenty minutes in and the Cruiser felt like it was struggling a bit, and a quick glimpse in the wing mirror revealled that disaster had struck and so early in the adventure too. Was this to be an omen for the next couple of days.  According to my stars in Saturday's NT News it was! The trailer axle had broken away from the spring and had swung back destroying the mudguard, essentially stopping the wheel from spinning, so the vehicle was dragging the trailer. A close inspection suggested that we'd better make a hasty repair and head home to make the necessary repairs, or.....make a hasty repair and keep going. The later decision won out and we soldiered on. It's funny how the old Darwin comeraderie seems to be lacking these days. During the half an hour or so that it took to tie up the axle, 3 vehicles pushed past and not one wound down the window and asked if we were ok! I thought that was a shame, years ago that jsut wouldnt have happened.



The anchor rope comes in handy again.

We managed the next 10km over the dirt without incident and arrived at the camping spot, on a Saturday morning and thankfully we had the place to ourselves. Sunday began nice and clear and calm so we wandered down to the sandbars below camp for a wade. There were schools of small queenfish patrolling the shallows and they were pretty easy to pick off with a small clouser.

Small but fun

Kate managed a 40cm giant herring that nailed the fly so close to the beach, that when it felt the hook and jumped, it landed on dry sand and was duly claimed, unhooked and released without a photo or realisation about how bloody special it is to catch one, oh well the next 2 mornings were spent trying to repeat the process without success. Anyhow Kate, Craig and I jumped in the tinny for a morning adventure over to the top of Indian Is. As you can imagine 3 in the tinny is a little tight, so we took turns at fishing. We found the usual schools of trevally, queenies and Russels snapper but mostly small.

We continued up the eastern side of Indian while it was still calm and were prospecting for golden snapper over a reef ledge when I hooked a jawfish. As I was bringing it up, a huge queenfish appeared out of nowhere and inspected the poor little bugger very closely before tearing off back over the reef edge. About 10 minutes later he reappeared behind Kate's clouser and ate it, much to the stunned amazement of everyone on board. Well this was the first fish Kate has hooked that was actually removing line, really quickly. She responded well to directions shouted to her from Craig and yours truely and a queeny of about 1.1-1.3 lept clear of the water about 50m out. It then decided to swim back toward the boat-smart queenfish! Poor kate was simply unable to keep a tight line on this fish and as the line pulled up tight again, the fly dropped out! Yep you can imagine the language! We spent another 20 minutes here for a couple of small snapper and stripies, yep real ones, before heading up to the top of the island. The wind was just starting to pick up and it was about 11am. Small schools of queenies were busting up on the patchy reef so a few casts were had, but the wind was starting to be a pain. Kate sat down and I grabbed her little 8 wt for a couple of casts. Well you can imagine what happened. On the first cast, the little green clouser was nailed..........by a GT that after 35 minutes was measured at just over 80cms. Kate's poor little Vision fly reel was a wobbly mess, the drag pretty well stuffed. She fished the rest of the weekend with a Lamson borrowed from Craig.

Kate's little Vision wasn't the only one feeling a little wobbly, the wind had really started to pick up and at around 20 knots we decided to head into the sheltered beach on Indian and have a break and some lunch. A decision was made that it was far too rough to head back to Turnbull the way we came and that it would be far more sheltered on the western side of Indian Is so off we charged. We travelled for about 45 minutes hugging the left hand shoreline thinking we'd come out through the narrow channel that seperates Indian from the mainland. We passed by a couple of boats fishing or anchored out of the wind and continued on our merry way. We poked our bow around a small rocky outcrop and spotted a huge croc basking in the afternoon sun.


That's a real croc, no photo-shopping here!




Some would say 25 foot, others would say 21, some would even suggest that it was a cardboard cut out! But no, it is real and he lives somewhere on Indian Island. We took some shots in absolute amazement and continued on, thinking we really must be nearing the bottom of the island soon. The channel started to narrow as expected and we had finally made it, gee Indian is a long island, the channel just kept going and was getting narrower and narrower, until it wasn't much wider than the boat. Bugger!! We didnt have a GPS, or the usual fish finder magazine so we did all we could, assumed we'd taken a left up a creek. So under Kate's instruction we headed back out of the creek and assuming we'd turned left into the creek and knowing there are no really big creeks on Indian assumed again we were on the mainland side, we turned right out of it and believed we were on the right track again as we passed boats fishing or anchored out of the wind and continued on our merry way. Hang on, didn't we pass them on the way in.... 45 minutes later we were back at the top of Indian Island wondering where the hell we went wrong. We were low on fuel by this stage so had no choice but to smash it into the wind and head the hard way back to camp. I hope someone can tell me where we went wrong because I still can't work it out even after looking at Google Earth.

That evening was spent chucking flies at the little queenies on the sandbar below camp.  Just before dark I was just enjoying casting off the beach instead of in a crowded tinny and was concentrating more of enjoying the act of fly casting rather than fishing, but my little pink clouser was in the water and something ate it, much to my amazement.  After a fiesty tussle I beached a nice little golden trevally of around 45cm.

The next day dawned full of promise, but that rapidly dimished with the arrival of a cold south easter picking up from about 15 knots. Kate opted to stay at camp so Craig and I headed off to the creeks in Turnbull bay looking for a barra or threadie. We hooked 4 and landed 1 plus a head of bream, queenies and trevally. The barra was a great size for a feed at 68cm and scoffed a WWSTS fly. 
We found a great snag on one little creek inlet that was crawling with bream and snapper, then jacks moved in and finally barra, but of all these fish we only boated a couple of small bream. That's when problem number 3 arose.  The gear shift on the outboard no longer served any useful function.  The motor (luckily) was stuck in forward.  No nuetral or reverse.  Time to go I think!

We threw the  crab pots in that afternoon and got ridiculously drunk that night, to the point of walking out at low tide to check the crab pots in the mangroves.  Don't ask me why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. 
The following morning dawned even windier than the day before, so we decided to call it quits and head home.  We still had the trailer to repair, so we packed up our extensive belongings and retied the makeshift spring arrangement on the trailer and limped home, happy to report that anchor rope makes a good axle support.  All in all though it was a fun trip with some nice fish caught.
But..... stay tuned for the next exciting installment of Craig and Dion's East Alligator adventure, but first we have some welding to do, and some outboard motor repairs, not to mention some navigation training.
See ya soon.