Trolling. How to fish badly.

We left Mooloolaba this morning at very early o'clock (sorry Terry) and headed for Double Island Point to wait for conditions to cross the Wide Bay bar.

Double Island Point from the south

The Wide Bay bar is said to be one of the worst (if not the worst) river bar on the East coast.  Bars are mean things with a reputation for nasty surprises and scary rides.  We've crossed a few now with no problems at all but that's mainly because they scare me sh**less so I make sure conditions are perfect before I make an attempt.  Adrenaline is over-rated when you're cruising IMHO.

We decided to go up to Double Island Point just south of the bar and anchor there waiting for the best conditions we could arrange.  Crossing the bar is best done on a high tide in the morning and with a swell less than 1.5 meters.  Wednesday morning looked good and Thursday morning looked even better.

Tackling the Wide Bay bar is like a right of passage for east coast cruisers.  You start about 3 miles off shore and head for some leeds (navigation aids) on Fraser Island until you line up with the leads on Inskip point and turn to follow them.  This dog leg takes you through some relatively deep water between two shoals, so you have breakers on both side but only the swell in the channel (in theory).  This is very scary because one thing that keel boats (actually any boat) must avoid is breaking waves.  Your rudder and prop lose traction and you turn into a chunk of plastic for the waves to play with.  Anyway, more on that later after we've actually done it.

To get to the point of this story, on the way up the coast, we thought we'd try out our new lure and paravane.  Trolling..  It worked well the first time we tried it in Morton Bay (thanks Thiels!).  We didn't catch anything but it did follow us around for a while.

So I put it out and promptly forgot about it.  A couple of hours later, we rounded the headland and anchored in the bay feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.  Me especially as I had put out a second anchor from the stern to hold the stern into the Easterly swell stopping the rolling!

Then just as I was settling, I noticed the trolling line was still out.. Worse, it was very tight over the stern..  Worse still, it broke when I tried to retrieve it leaving me with about 2 meters of badly twisted line in my hand.

As you've probably guessed, we had reversed over it when we set the anchor and it was wrapped around the prop!

So I spent the rest of the arvo diving down on the prop cutting away fishing line :-(

My guess is that the god of fisherfolk looks like this:

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Location: Queensland, Australia
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