Is It Science or Plain Bad Luck? (below)

Perilous Angling in the Land of the Hock-Tooey Fish

A Florida Fisherman in the Galapago Islands
part 1 - The Big Score


Perilous Angling in the Land of
the Hock-Tooey Fish

Australia is an ancient land. The outback has an extraterrestrial look to it, a Martian landscape already old and crumbled down when the rest of our earth was just starting to build.

This impression is unavoidable as you travel through it’s dust like a teen age girl falling in love with a vindictive old man.

The time of real vitality has passed and been replaced by a chaotic meandering toward the end. In this final phase, venom is perfected, perhaps the true goal of evolution.
 

“Great!” I thought. “There I am, walking a stream, casting to God knows what. It’s not bad enough having to watch for tiger snakes, deaf adders and stinging trees. Now I have to worry about some crazy fish humming arrows at me.”

It is no accident that you will rarely read of anyone angling for this pan-size predator. I, myself, from the same fear that pervades the general population, did not pursue him. When the hot winds of fortune finally blew us together, I was relieved to find his reputation with the bow as exaggerated as the quality of Australian manhood. All they do is spit.

My goal was to sleep atop Ayre’s Rock, the world’s biggest monolith, but hitchiking from the Queensland coast to the epicenter of Nowhere is unpredictable at best. With an irresistible side trip to Longreach, a town requiring days to escape because nobody’s leaving, then days without traffic at the gold mining settlement, Mt. Isah, followed by a blown head gasket when I finally did get a lift, resulting in three days immersed in “the worst fly outbreak in forty years” and the inescapable stench of two rotting cows, fruition had taken a couple weeks.

Yes, mosquitoes are everywhere. Atop that giant red jelly bean anchoring a desert roughly the size of the United States, there was one to serenade me as I lay down to dream.

After hitching from there to Darwin, where I would fly out, I returned to the Northern Territory’s Yaka Kakadu National Park with Peter, a young Aussie fellow who had given me my last ride in nine months of thumbing down under. He was touring his native continent on the dole and five finger discount.

In the various billabongs by which we camped, imagine my surprise and terror that archer fish could always be seen under overhanging ramalamadingdong branches, lurking in groups just below the surface. I quickly realized they posed no threat and set about plotting their demise. Their proximity to shrubbery made snags a likely prospect, especially since the fly rod was my chosen vehicle.

For the uninitiated, billabong is one of those marvelous Aborigine words, referring to oasis's scattered about the outback. Some simply remain after the monsoon has receded and some are fed by a river. Their contents are fresh and delicious. I was told that out of reverence, the Aborigines will not bathe in them.

The Aborigine language is full of words that are just plain fun to say - the exact opposite of English but much like Rock ‘n’ Roll. Ting tang walla walla bing bang.

Call them primitive if you like.
They don’t build cities, it’s true.
But we have to say “long hollow tube”
while they’re saying “didgeridoo.”

From whom other than a hot, weary Aborigine on walkabout could the name “coolabah” have come... as the shade of this tree miraculously appearing by a distant billabong. English has given us the cottonwood.

Many claim to have fly fished, but few truly have. They have fished a fly, but on the water. I was such a fraud until going up against the archer fish. To truly fly fish, you entice your quarry not while your offering lies dead in the water, but while still “on the fly”. This is how you must attack the archer fish, for he is not interested in sitting bugs. Giving us all a lesson in integrity, if it is not falling, it does not appear on his menu.

After many puzzling casts where my flies wafted to the surface attended by all the grace and dignity that any fly fisherman should need to imbue, and fairly splattered with authenticity, only to be ignored, it became clear they would not take a floating fly as would the less virtuous trout, bluegill or bass of the real world.

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