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Home / The Country

Teach this man to fish, and he can barely feed himself

By Craig Cooper
Northern Advocate·
10 Mar, 2017 05:00 PM3 mins to read

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Craig Cooper (that's not him by the way) has never caught a kingfish this big and probably never will.
Craig Cooper (that's not him by the way) has never caught a kingfish this big and probably never will.

Craig Cooper (that's not him by the way) has never caught a kingfish this big and probably never will.

I catch an occasional fish to eat but is it sport for me?

Leaning back in your creaky seat and putting your feet up is a big part of my fishing.

Although when you have removed the seats because you didn't screw them in properly, it makes leaning back a little difficult.

Something I failed to mention to my better half who accompanied me last weekend.

As we drove out to the boat ramp I waxed lyrical about how relaxing fishing with her was.

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She coped well with learning there were no seats in the boat, as it has bench seats down the side you can sit on when you fish. Not while driving the boat though.

Which she also coped admirably with, when the chilly bin she was sitting on was sliding about, as she steered us out to Spot X, clinging on to the steering wheel to avoid sliding backwards on the chilly bin.

She also coped with me interrogating her as to whether she had flicked the bait transducement switch off, as it drains the battery.

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Personally, I regard turning the bait transducement switch off as the responsibility of the person steering, as the switch is generally located adjacent to the wheel.

I only checked the switch was turned off an hour after we had anchored, so there was some brief concern expressed by my wife that the battery might be flat and we would be swimming to shore.

There was no problem though - the bait transducement switch didn't flatten the battery because no such switch exists.

Some minor tension ensued, made worse by my multi-tasking attempts at baiting my line, my wife's line, and loading nylon on a new rod I had bought that morning.

Having finally loaded up the new reel with nylon, I then spent several minutes trying to untangle the bird's nest I created soon after when the sinker dropped overboard while the reel was in free spool.

I gave up and started hacking at the nylon with a knife, before tossing the rod aside.

Some large piper turned up in our berley trail, and I remembered that my son had two sprat lines in my tackle box.

Sadly, there is now only one sprat line left after the biggest piper I have ever seen took the line and sped off.

Actually, that's not true - I also tangled the sprat line.

There were so many bird's nests aboard our wee tinny, homeless seagulls were circling, ready to settle down.

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A kingfish broke the boredom, and my wife now knows that when you put a net in the water, the fish doesn't just swim into the net, some scooping is required.

And when I threw it back after learning it was the same 73cm kingfish I caught the week earlier, we decided to haul in the lines that weren't tangled and head home.

Yes, fishing isn't just a sport to me, it's relaxation too.

As they say, your worst ever day's fishing is always better than your best ever day at work.

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