What is the greatest fisheries offense you have seen?
After reading Neels' herring story it reminded me of a couple episodes..
1. We were fishing in the Daly River, NT competing in the Barra Classic. The comp is tag and release.
The fish were going off, and everyone was catching nice 80cm+ barra.
A hire boat had a 3 old "Wogs" on board and they were having a great time with their locked drags and 50 pound mono.
After a couple hours these old bloke come up to us and offer us a couple of barra "We have gone over our limit". That means they had 17 big barra on board.
We told them "No thanks we are competing in a comp and not allowed to have dead fish on board." The old blokes pissed off back to their caravan park, unloaded and were back out for the afternoon to do it again! How much bloody fish can you eat????
2. Same location, a cherabin drowner was tied up in the mouth of a nice creek and was catching good fish. We saw him hook up to a meterey, and trolled a bit closer for a look. As soon as he had it in the boat, out with the knife and cut it's throat.
We did a u turn to troll back past the spot and he now opens his massive esky and offers us a matre plus threadfin salmon. "Got no room for the big barra, do you want a salmon?"
We declined and it threw the big salmon into the water for the crocs? Greedy bastard!
3. Was in SA at a popular crabbing beach. We returned with our bag limit and saw a bunch of mysterious Vietnamese playing in the weed by the carpark. They grabbed their gear and headed back out into the water to catch crabs. We went over to where they were acting strange and discovered they had about 150 crabs buried in the weed. They were obviously going back out to double their catch. GREEDY PRICKS!!
Well, theres a couple of my bad experiences with greedy people. What have you seen?
EL SYD
Posts: 599
Date Joined: 16/08/10
not really a exceeding the
not really a exceeding the bag limit thing,
But i once had a townie try and re-land a barra i had just revived and released with a landing net on the bank of one of my favorite rivers.
i quickly ankle tapped him and he fell into the river propper, and his mates had to pull him up the bank, I leaned up against their car and the matter was not taken further.
but that experience has ruined fishing in that creek when its crowded. dont bother with the landbased barra thing during run off.
Josh
Posts: 283
Date Joined: 14/09/10
Not a bag limit, but were
Not a bag limit, but were offened by fisheries. When I had my first boat, 1960's Alloy dehaviland runabout with about 30cm sides, I was fishing in the lee of little island just out the front of hillarys, and this huge fisheries leisure cat or similar starts plowing right straight toward us, side on, while we are at anchor , with a guy standing right at the front, a scene similar to the iconic titanic movie poster shot. Getting a little worried that this bloke is going to run us down and were going to have to jump ship as he steams toward us, then at the last minuite throws it into reverse, and manages to stop about a foot from the side us, leaning right down, doubled over, and gives us a pamphlet about marine parks and tells us how one of the boundry markers has flaoted away. The boys in the fisheries boat probably had a bit of a laugh as they took off, sure wasnt happy on our end!
woody
Posts: 617
Date Joined: 27/02/08
Got sent a picture and text
Got sent a picture and text from a mate just last night of 7 undersize marron he had just caught...in a yabbie trap....does that count?
collin g wood
Posts: 313
Date Joined: 18/04/11
Thevernard
Went to Mac Islands about 3 years ago, every evening we saw these guys filleting and very neatly kryovacing heaps of red emp fillets, seems that's all they were targeting which is fine,but for 6 blokes in 3 boats seemed like a hell of a lot of fish, when they were leaving the island we saw them loading large bags of fillets into engel fridges on there boats( presumably 20kg bags) didn't think anymore of it until we saw another 6 bags of fillets with their names on them, in the island freezer ready for courier transport, by thenit was too late to do anything unfortunately.
quadfisher
Posts: 1146
Date Joined: 28/09/10
hehe.
Dont let the spanish in!
quadfisher
surfhead
Posts: 109
Date Joined: 25/06/13
So
So no need to blame the Asians then !
meglodon
Posts: 5981
Date Joined: 17/06/10
Crabbing with prawn drag net
A couple of years ago I was down near the mouth of the serpentine river and spotted two blokes with olive completions dragging a prawn net. Nothing strange about this except it happened to be 1030 in the morning. I watched them dragging this net up around down and back to the shore, on reaching the shore a Holden ute drove up to where they were then stopped, the two guys threw the net into the back of the ute and then they both jumped in the back on top of the net and the ute then took off at great speed. It took me a few seconds to work out what was going on, then it dawned on me the rat bags where dragging the net and netting all the crabs that had the bad luck of being caught in the net size or quantity didn't matter. It only took a matter of seconds and they were gone with their ill gotten catch with no trace left of what they had been up to.
Paully
Posts: 3246
Date Joined: 15/08/09
Minced Crabs
I remember when I was a young fella and was spending a lot of time in Mandurah, crabbing near and around Dawsville with the grandparents - I heard about and saw people who were in their tinnys putting crabs (small blues) straight through a hand wind mincer on board - shell and all. It apparently, was not an uncommon practice - for a group of people that frequented the area very regularly. These people would also take many more than they should of of legal sized crabs - even back then, it made me bristle.