Seasick Fishing

The week was full of various farm work. Catherine left on Thursday, heading back up to Falconbridge. That meant that James and me had a bit more work to shoulder, but the stressful week of cattle sorting is over for now. Sometime in the near future it will have to be done again, as some cows are still with calf. The week was packed with driving out hay to the various mobs in the paddock, repairing an old Chamberlin tractor, repairing a seeder for sowing some fields and checking on the still expecting cows with a quad bike in the setting sun of the evening.

For the weekend a bit of relaxing was in order. Once again fishing on Saturday. The weather was forecast with good conditions and we set of in time this time. Just James and me, thought, so we went to Portland again. Driving there we saw a load (or in Victorian Australian “a s**tload) of kangaroos. They where just everywhere, on the roads, beside, in the gumtree forest, on the fields. Heaps and heaps of them. They are not very well liked in the area, as they are part of a lot of car accidents and eat away the grass which the cattle should be getting. They still are interesting to watch, especially the way they hop along and come in a lot of sizes, from just coming up to a meter to standing taller than me at over two metres. We arrived in Portland and there where already a lot of other boats out, gone far out to the continental shelf (about 40km out) to try catching some tuna. We just went of the coast of Portland again, had a lot of bites last time. Whilst James was driving out I was reading through the manual for a sonar he has bought and got it up and running to see some fish underwater. Was a bit empty and after stopping the motor and putting out the roods we spent a while not getting anything. James caught a flat head which are excellent to eat and a few parrot heads over the day, which where thrown back again as they don't taste that well. I spent the majority of the day being seasick. Not the real bad seasick, just not felling very well. Third time that has now happened to me in my life and I didn't learn from last time. James took some anti-seasick pill in the morning and I

 declined thinking I would be okay. I regretted that decision in the long run and wasn't fishing at all after a while. James had a few roads out just being manned by him. One was attached to a shark hook, but the only thing it ended up catching was an albatross. The bird had grabbed the end of the hook with the fish on and got it caught in its wing, so James reeled it back in, bird still on the line. I grabbed it by the neck whilst James got the hook of and how does the large bird say thank you. Bites me in the arm. He wasn't that strong and I was not hindered in any way, nor did I get injured. He did manage to bite a hole through my rain jacket, unluckily. After not catching anything else except a flat head after nearly seven hours we set back of towards Portland, just to be caught in a highway of boats returning back from tuna fishing. Shortly worded, we got out, found out we had done something wrong, had to get the boat back in and then on properly, all in a high stress area.

On the way back we visited James's cousin Brian and had a long chat with him, his wife and their child about a lot of things. They own a horse farm and their son takes part in rodeo, some activity I was offered to try, so I'll see when I can get down there to do that. Took back a dog that Brian didn't need anymore (or found) to look for an owner and had a pizza before heading home for some rest.

Relaxing day but could have done without the seasickness.