Hervey Bay’s recent Fly Fishing History
Maybe this is a good time to put the Hervey Bay fishery into some kind of historical context as it is a very important fishery in terms of the development of saltwater fly fishing in this country, and I keep seeing references to it as though its just been discovered.
A fishing writer called Warren Steptoe was the first to alert sport fishermen to the fishery at the top end of Fraser Island, notably the Platypus Bay and Roony’s Point areas. Warren caught many small black marlin on trolled baits and lures along the edges of the flats back in the 80’s and wrote about it regularly in Modern Fishing magazine. Warren and his mates were mostly lure fishermen but they also carried fly tackle and in particular caught spotty mackerel and tuna in the Platypus Bay area.
It needs to be understood that this marlin fishery is not a consistent or predictable fishery - its not even an annual event, however the appearance of numbers of these small marlin can be forecast from about August September when they begin to appear in far North Queensland off Cairns and Townsville. These aggregations form on known baitfish grounds inside the Great Barrier Reef. Once they show up there in numbers its generally understood there will be a good migration of these fish south down the east coast and they’ll appear in all sorts of places. The migration usually culminates at Port Stephens in NSW. Some migration years are better than others.
According to our leading billfish biologist Julian Pepperell, since records have been kept (since 1960) there have only been 12 years when this run has occurred so don’t let anyone sell you a trip on the promise of it being an annual event.
I first encountered these fish at Roony’s Point in 1997 on a boat called Obsession – the deck hand was Damon Olsen who now owns Nomad Charters. We picked up a small marlin while we were filming up there and you could see bottom at the time – it was on a trolled lure. On a subsequent trip Toby Evans caught what is probably the largest sailfish landed on fly gear in this country, a fish of around 55 kilos, it was caught along the huge sand spit that runs to the north of the island.
Sid Boshamer was the pioneer flats guide in Hervey Bay. In the early 90’s he ran a very successful charter fishing operation that mostly catered for bait fishermen looking to fill their eskies with fillets. They fished the reefs to the north of Fraser Island. Sid was, and still is an outstanding fisherman, one of the very best I know. On a trip in 1994 he had Dean Butler along as a writer and they were blown out of the north of the island and came down into the Bay proper for a look at the flats, perhaps hoping to find a bonefish. They spied tailing fish - “Golden Trevally” said Sid. Dean failed to catch one at the time but was very excited by what he’d seen. Sid was not a fly fisherman at that stage but pretty quickly caught the bug and set up a flats guiding business based out of Kingfisher Bay Resort. Sid had tremendous knowledge of that area from many years of fishing it. He also had a squeaky voiced sidekick, his son Jarred, who at the time would have been blown away in a moderate south easterly, but who would fish 24/7 and spent more time on the jetties of Hervey Bay than at school.
To explore and promote this fishery, and to get some experienced people onto the flats chasing the golden trevally it was decided to hold a fly tournament. It was first held in 1995 out of Kingfisher Bay resort and Dean Butler won that competition. I was away to the north of Fraser Island on a filming mission at the time and didn’t compete, but did pick up a goldie on the flats with Sid a day or so after the tournament in very windy tough conditions, and this was also caught on camera for the first Wildfish series.
The tournament was held again the following year with a field of pretty good anglers, most coming from Brisbane but with a few travellers from further south. Rod Harrison, one of the pioneers of SWF in this country fished with Sid and I fished with Rob and Leeann Payne who had little fly fishing experience at that stage, but were very fine and knowledgeable anglers who in the ensuing years caught many goldies on the Hervey bay flats. I won that second tournament with, as I recall, 5 goldies.
In the following year, 1997, I fished the tournament with Alan Philliskirk. Word of this fishery had begun to spread and there were 24 teams that year. Alan and I caught a goldie each on the flats on day one and Kaj Busch caught one out of a spawning aggregation in deeper water – but that was it for the goldies. In the rules other species also counted, although the goldies carried big points. With 24 boats zooming all over the flats the golden trevally had vanished by day 2. It was a very early lesson in how boat traffic over the flats could ruin the fishery.
One of the other teams in the comp (Paul Dolan, a current HB guide and the longest working guide in HB) had figured this out, and had been fishing to the north and was close behind us with a tally of queenfish and longtails. Figuring the goldie bite was over we headed north to play the same game. Because goldies were worth so many points we had a very close look at the extensive flats on the inside of Roony’s Point and its was then that we discovered the longtail tuna cruising the flats in only 2 meters of water - so we caught them instead, and caught enough of them in there on the flats, and out in Platypus Bay to blitz the tournament. I won champion angler and “Fish” Philliskirk and Bushy won an Abel reel each for biggest goldie – there was half a centimetre in it.
I showed this tuna flats fishery to Sid a year or so later when we were again filming up there - he didn’t know about it at the time and I don’t think he’d even believed us when we told him about it during the debriefing at the competition. On this later visit we managed to catch some big goldens on the Roony’s Point flats (the ones in the second Wildfish series). When this went to air it created a minor stampede of fired up fly fishermen travelling from Brisbane and places further away, but they soon discovered how difficult those flats goldies can be. The tuna were always a viable second option and Hervey Bay soon became part of the SE Qld tuna circuit.
I visited the bay many times over the next few years – one trip was particularly memorable because I was guiding Rob Sloane from FlyLife magazine on his first saltwater fly fishing trip, that would have been 1999 and we were joined on my boat by Daniel Rheinbott. We caught goldies on the flats and many big Mac tuna (similar to false albacore). I did a winter longtail trip with John Clark and Sid at around the same time and we caught big longtails down around the islands and channels where they were hunting bait up against the sand banks. We never saw another fly fisherman on all of these trips. I visited those flats several times over the next few years and we caught longtails in shallow water on most of those trips.
Rod Harrison was also a regular visitor and fished with Paul Dolan a good deal – Bruce Richards of Scientific Anglers and later Jim Vincent were both taken to the HB flats by Harro and considered it to be a tough fishery.
A few years later I fished the bay in winter with Sid and a Japanese guy called Tak Adachi and a young Nat Bromhead came along for the ride and to fish on his first fly fishing trip to the bay. Sid took us to the Tin Can Bay (southern end) and we caught good tuna in mid winter, a fishery that still exists, but that few know about.
Six months later I spent a couple of weeks up there with Sid and we had a few groups of fishermen come through. We fished the impoundments for bass and barra and the saltwater for tuna and goldies, and in the first week had some great fishing with Toby Evans and Geoff Smith from WA out on the flats. On one memorable occasion Toby and I had scored a goldie each on a making tide and were back on the boat having lunch. The boat was anchored on the flats in about 5 feet of water - we rinsed the plates off and an oil slick from the salad dressing drifted out over the flats with the top of the incoming tide. A bunch of baitfish started feeding in the slick and minutes later we were sight casting to, and catching, big mac tuna without even lifting the anchor.
The goldies put in a rare appearance these days because of fishing pressure and because of the guys driving their boats over the flats on a making tide when they are supposed to move in, but their numbers have also taken a battering from the bait fishing fraternity. Driving your boat over the flats anywhere near another boat is like entering a river a pool upstream of another angler, and a guide doing this to another guide should be shot – it is the height of arrogance and rudeness.
Sid gave up guiding after a stint on the local council where he fought tooth and nail to have commercial netting banned from the flats, these days he sells real estate and fishes for pleasure – usually with Mark Bargenquast. His son Jarred, the little squeaky voiced guy who would have been blown away if not for the sinkers in his pockets is now around 6’6” – (with early tutelage from Rod Harrison) is one of the finest young fly casters and fishermen I know. He’s flown all over the world to work as a professional deckhand on marlin boats, I think he currently lives on Walker’s Key for most of the year and spends his down time catching big bones and chasing sheilas – keep a lookout for him you travellers – he’s known on the marlin circuit as “Dingo”. There’s some great recent footage on the Fishing DVD www.fishingdvd.com.au of him and a guy called Scott Amon sight casting with baits and flies to marlin on the flats inside Roony’s point. John Haenke also filmed an instructional marlin bait rigging dvd with Jarred on those same flats a few years ago, and they caught marlin on light tackle right there. I believe Jarred will be mother shipping Roony’s Point in those migration years when there are big numbers of these fish.
Sid spent a good deal of time fishing with Hervey Bay local Mark Bargenquast over the years and Mark eventually bought Sid’s boat to start up his own guiding business. Nat Bromhead also did some guiding for Sid - one place Sid did not tell him about was the tuna on the flats inside Roony’s – that was my mistake - some ten years after Philliskirk and I had first found them. We’d kept it very quiet until then and Sid had taken just a few of his overseas clients and a few people he trusted up to that special fishery under Station Hill.
I’ve heard of quite a few marlin that have been hooked on fly tackle, and one that was caught sight casting off Roony’s Point in the biggest migration year ever recorded - 1997. The fish were surfing in the pressure waves as the tide was falling and ambushing bait swept out by the tide, these baitfish are mostly garfish. 1997 was the year Peter Pakula also caught several small black marlin sight casting to them in the back of the surf off Stradbroke Island south of Hervey Bay – these were free swimming fish. In that year the migration was so large some 2,000 marlin were tagged off Port Stephens in a 10 day period.
I was up there filming again last year and had a shot at a small black on the flats in May, it hit the clouser several times (we were chasing tuna) but had a garfish across its mouth that it wasn’t going to let go of. Later in the year 2 young guys, James Otto and Justin Nye (a good mate of Jarred Boshammer’s) caught an estimated 100 lb black on the flats, on fly, on a 9 weight rod - that was the first of the season and the first on the flats (and still the biggest by a considerable margin) and they sent me a very excited email – here’s a report on it from Hervey Bay guide Paul Dolan’s web site http://www.frasercoastsportfishing.com/artman/publish/article_202.shtml.
Jack de Pasquale fishing with former Alpine Angler tackle store owner Scott Mitchell also caught one on the flats.
The Hervey Bay fishery is important because it is a reasonably sheltered fishery along a pretty windy coast and it’s fed by warm oceanic currents from the north. The top end of Fraser Island also pokes a long way out into the warm currents. It’s also a considerable chapter of recent swf history in this country. There are plenty of earlier footprints all over the fishery.
Maybe this is a good time to put the Hervey Bay fishery into some kind of historical context as it is a very important fishery in terms of the development of saltwater fly fishing in this country, and I keep seeing references to it as though its just been discovered.
A fishing writer called Warren Steptoe was the first to alert sport fishermen to the fishery at the top end of Fraser Island, notably the Platypus Bay and Roony’s Point areas. Warren caught many small black marlin on trolled baits and lures along the edges of the flats back in the 80’s and wrote about it regularly in Modern Fishing magazine. Warren and his mates were mostly lure fishermen but they also carried fly tackle and in particular caught spotty mackerel and tuna in the Platypus Bay area.
It needs to be understood that this marlin fishery is not a consistent or predictable fishery - its not even an annual event, however the appearance of numbers of these small marlin can be forecast from about August September when they begin to appear in far North Queensland off Cairns and Townsville. These aggregations form on known baitfish grounds inside the Great Barrier Reef. Once they show up there in numbers its generally understood there will be a good migration of these fish south down the east coast and they’ll appear in all sorts of places. The migration usually culminates at Port Stephens in NSW. Some migration years are better than others.
According to our leading billfish biologist Julian Pepperell, since records have been kept (since 1960) there have only been 12 years when this run has occurred so don’t let anyone sell you a trip on the promise of it being an annual event.
I first encountered these fish at Roony’s Point in 1997 on a boat called Obsession – the deck hand was Damon Olsen who now owns Nomad Charters. We picked up a small marlin while we were filming up there and you could see bottom at the time – it was on a trolled lure. On a subsequent trip Toby Evans caught what is probably the largest sailfish landed on fly gear in this country, a fish of around 55 kilos, it was caught along the huge sand spit that runs to the north of the island.
Sid Boshamer was the pioneer flats guide in Hervey Bay. In the early 90’s he ran a very successful charter fishing operation that mostly catered for bait fishermen looking to fill their eskies with fillets. They fished the reefs to the north of Fraser Island. Sid was, and still is an outstanding fisherman, one of the very best I know. On a trip in 1994 he had Dean Butler along as a writer and they were blown out of the north of the island and came down into the Bay proper for a look at the flats, perhaps hoping to find a bonefish. They spied tailing fish - “Golden Trevally” said Sid. Dean failed to catch one at the time but was very excited by what he’d seen. Sid was not a fly fisherman at that stage but pretty quickly caught the bug and set up a flats guiding business based out of Kingfisher Bay Resort. Sid had tremendous knowledge of that area from many years of fishing it. He also had a squeaky voiced sidekick, his son Jarred, who at the time would have been blown away in a moderate south easterly, but who would fish 24/7 and spent more time on the jetties of Hervey Bay than at school.
To explore and promote this fishery, and to get some experienced people onto the flats chasing the golden trevally it was decided to hold a fly tournament. It was first held in 1995 out of Kingfisher Bay resort and Dean Butler won that competition. I was away to the north of Fraser Island on a filming mission at the time and didn’t compete, but did pick up a goldie on the flats with Sid a day or so after the tournament in very windy tough conditions, and this was also caught on camera for the first Wildfish series.
The tournament was held again the following year with a field of pretty good anglers, most coming from Brisbane but with a few travellers from further south. Rod Harrison, one of the pioneers of SWF in this country fished with Sid and I fished with Rob and Leeann Payne who had little fly fishing experience at that stage, but were very fine and knowledgeable anglers who in the ensuing years caught many goldies on the Hervey bay flats. I won that second tournament with, as I recall, 5 goldies.
In the following year, 1997, I fished the tournament with Alan Philliskirk. Word of this fishery had begun to spread and there were 24 teams that year. Alan and I caught a goldie each on the flats on day one and Kaj Busch caught one out of a spawning aggregation in deeper water – but that was it for the goldies. In the rules other species also counted, although the goldies carried big points. With 24 boats zooming all over the flats the golden trevally had vanished by day 2. It was a very early lesson in how boat traffic over the flats could ruin the fishery.
One of the other teams in the comp (Paul Dolan, a current HB guide and the longest working guide in HB) had figured this out, and had been fishing to the north and was close behind us with a tally of queenfish and longtails. Figuring the goldie bite was over we headed north to play the same game. Because goldies were worth so many points we had a very close look at the extensive flats on the inside of Roony’s Point and its was then that we discovered the longtail tuna cruising the flats in only 2 meters of water - so we caught them instead, and caught enough of them in there on the flats, and out in Platypus Bay to blitz the tournament. I won champion angler and “Fish” Philliskirk and Bushy won an Abel reel each for biggest goldie – there was half a centimetre in it.
I showed this tuna flats fishery to Sid a year or so later when we were again filming up there - he didn’t know about it at the time and I don’t think he’d even believed us when we told him about it during the debriefing at the competition. On this later visit we managed to catch some big goldens on the Roony’s Point flats (the ones in the second Wildfish series). When this went to air it created a minor stampede of fired up fly fishermen travelling from Brisbane and places further away, but they soon discovered how difficult those flats goldies can be. The tuna were always a viable second option and Hervey Bay soon became part of the SE Qld tuna circuit.
I visited the bay many times over the next few years – one trip was particularly memorable because I was guiding Rob Sloane from FlyLife magazine on his first saltwater fly fishing trip, that would have been 1999 and we were joined on my boat by Daniel Rheinbott. We caught goldies on the flats and many big Mac tuna (similar to false albacore). I did a winter longtail trip with John Clark and Sid at around the same time and we caught big longtails down around the islands and channels where they were hunting bait up against the sand banks. We never saw another fly fisherman on all of these trips. I visited those flats several times over the next few years and we caught longtails in shallow water on most of those trips.
Rod Harrison was also a regular visitor and fished with Paul Dolan a good deal – Bruce Richards of Scientific Anglers and later Jim Vincent were both taken to the HB flats by Harro and considered it to be a tough fishery.
A few years later I fished the bay in winter with Sid and a Japanese guy called Tak Adachi and a young Nat Bromhead came along for the ride and to fish on his first fly fishing trip to the bay. Sid took us to the Tin Can Bay (southern end) and we caught good tuna in mid winter, a fishery that still exists, but that few know about.
Six months later I spent a couple of weeks up there with Sid and we had a few groups of fishermen come through. We fished the impoundments for bass and barra and the saltwater for tuna and goldies, and in the first week had some great fishing with Toby Evans and Geoff Smith from WA out on the flats. On one memorable occasion Toby and I had scored a goldie each on a making tide and were back on the boat having lunch. The boat was anchored on the flats in about 5 feet of water - we rinsed the plates off and an oil slick from the salad dressing drifted out over the flats with the top of the incoming tide. A bunch of baitfish started feeding in the slick and minutes later we were sight casting to, and catching, big mac tuna without even lifting the anchor.
The goldies put in a rare appearance these days because of fishing pressure and because of the guys driving their boats over the flats on a making tide when they are supposed to move in, but their numbers have also taken a battering from the bait fishing fraternity. Driving your boat over the flats anywhere near another boat is like entering a river a pool upstream of another angler, and a guide doing this to another guide should be shot – it is the height of arrogance and rudeness.
Sid gave up guiding after a stint on the local council where he fought tooth and nail to have commercial netting banned from the flats, these days he sells real estate and fishes for pleasure – usually with Mark Bargenquast. His son Jarred, the little squeaky voiced guy who would have been blown away if not for the sinkers in his pockets is now around 6’6” – (with early tutelage from Rod Harrison) is one of the finest young fly casters and fishermen I know. He’s flown all over the world to work as a professional deckhand on marlin boats, I think he currently lives on Walker’s Key for most of the year and spends his down time catching big bones and chasing sheilas – keep a lookout for him you travellers – he’s known on the marlin circuit as “Dingo”. There’s some great recent footage on the Fishing DVD www.fishingdvd.com.au of him and a guy called Scott Amon sight casting with baits and flies to marlin on the flats inside Roony’s point. John Haenke also filmed an instructional marlin bait rigging dvd with Jarred on those same flats a few years ago, and they caught marlin on light tackle right there. I believe Jarred will be mother shipping Roony’s Point in those migration years when there are big numbers of these fish.
Sid spent a good deal of time fishing with Hervey Bay local Mark Bargenquast over the years and Mark eventually bought Sid’s boat to start up his own guiding business. Nat Bromhead also did some guiding for Sid - one place Sid did not tell him about was the tuna on the flats inside Roony’s – that was my mistake - some ten years after Philliskirk and I had first found them. We’d kept it very quiet until then and Sid had taken just a few of his overseas clients and a few people he trusted up to that special fishery under Station Hill.
I’ve heard of quite a few marlin that have been hooked on fly tackle, and one that was caught sight casting off Roony’s Point in the biggest migration year ever recorded - 1997. The fish were surfing in the pressure waves as the tide was falling and ambushing bait swept out by the tide, these baitfish are mostly garfish. 1997 was the year Peter Pakula also caught several small black marlin sight casting to them in the back of the surf off Stradbroke Island south of Hervey Bay – these were free swimming fish. In that year the migration was so large some 2,000 marlin were tagged off Port Stephens in a 10 day period.
I was up there filming again last year and had a shot at a small black on the flats in May, it hit the clouser several times (we were chasing tuna) but had a garfish across its mouth that it wasn’t going to let go of. Later in the year 2 young guys, James Otto and Justin Nye (a good mate of Jarred Boshammer’s) caught an estimated 100 lb black on the flats, on fly, on a 9 weight rod - that was the first of the season and the first on the flats (and still the biggest by a considerable margin) and they sent me a very excited email – here’s a report on it from Hervey Bay guide Paul Dolan’s web site http://www.frasercoastsportfishing.com/artman/publish/article_202.shtml.
Jack de Pasquale fishing with former Alpine Angler tackle store owner Scott Mitchell also caught one on the flats.
The Hervey Bay fishery is important because it is a reasonably sheltered fishery along a pretty windy coast and it’s fed by warm oceanic currents from the north. The top end of Fraser Island also pokes a long way out into the warm currents. It’s also a considerable chapter of recent swf history in this country. There are plenty of earlier footprints all over the fishery.