Fishing at Busselton Jetty 31st Dec 08

Busselton jetty is a 1.8km long jetty which is approximately 3-4 hours drive south from our house. We went with a few friends and reached around 10am. Fishing was quiet throughout the day with only a few teeny weeny fishes caught and we missed a tailor run in the morning where some kids caught tailor fishes over 40cm. The only thing that were plentiful were the damn flies and trumpeters (trumpeters are small stripy fishes that don't taste nice at all; so are used as bait only).

On the way to the jetty


This is the end of the jetty where we "camped"


Moses caught this SUPER large pufferfish/blowfish/blowie.


It's larger than his slippers


Around 6pm, we caught this octopus in our crabnet!! It kept slithering out; took us several tries!


After awhile, it was followed by this starfish. This was starting to get weird!




Around 8.30pm this bunch of Koreans found an eagle ray having dinner in their crab net. Lucky asses.



At that point of time, I've been squid jigging almost half the length of the jetty for about an hour plus but couldn't get any, didn't see a lot of people catch squid during the day either. At 9.30pm we decided to pack our stuff and move from lamp post to lamp post to jig for squid. The jetty had almost 30 plus lamp posts and we only covered 10 lamp posts which took us about 4 hours!!

We thought the day would end without any squid when Zq caught her first squid at lamp post #23. This got us really excited especially Zq because she has never caught a squid by herself before.

After awhile, at lamp post #21, she felt this huge "sangkot" (line got stuck), which moved when she tried pulling really hard, she then knew it was a squid and called me to pull it up. As I reeled it in, it was super heavy and I couldn't even get it out of the water because it's squirt was so strong that it kept pulling my rod down. In the end, we had to lower our crab net down to lift it up.

At first sight it looked like a liver! It's one huge piece of liver-coloured, brownish mass. On closer look, it was a cuttlefish (we at first thought it was a calamari)!!! and a huge one at that ~1.5-2kg!


Johan holding the cuttlefish; you can see how thick it is.


This marked the end of our trip to Busselton. We reached the jetty back at 2.30am and slept for only 3 hours before we headed off to Mandurah to catch some crabs, this will be in the next post!