The Local Adventures of Worleybird

Leading up to christmas it had been windy everyday with NE sea breezes!!  I was hanging to get a fish offshore but haven’t had a chance.  So on boxing day I decide i’m gonna get out for a fish no matter what the weather, just probably not offshore.  I organise with a mate to paddle right up Pine creek and chase some bass, GTs and Jacks in the arvo.  

By the time that comes around it had started raining and I get that phone call:  “are we still gonna go out??” i.e ‘it’s looking a bit too wet!’.  I say that I’m going out no matter what but suggest that we should maybe go out somewhere that we can stay closer to the launch (to appease those who are less convinced!!!)  We decide same launch just stay in bonville creek.

I was getting my stuff into the car and it starts to rain harder and I get another call:  “How about now?  You still going out?  In this??”.  I re-affirm my position: “Yep still going out”, but realising the tone behind the phone call I also offer the option of piking with no ramifications of name calling etc if my mate doesn’t want to go.  That option is quickly taken and confirmed and I am now open to going where ever I want at whatever time.  This new availability of choices turns out to be not a freeing development, as I then fiddled for over an hour and ummed and aaahed about where to go.  After long deliberations I decide to head to the top of a local creek on the basis of a successful trip and report on this section of river by adrian.

Finally I get on the water around 5ish.  The water was very fresh (and felt like a bath at about 26 degrees!!) and so I decide to head downstream.  I had my basscada topcrawler on my big rod and my new hawk lure (fake chubby) on the little rod.  The fish were just spooking from the surface lures so I stuck with the little rod and got a couple of bream. I was throwing the chubby replica around in about two feet of water over a little gravel race and got a few hits.  I could see a fair few bream cruising around, so I was mostly just sight fishing, looking for fish then casting at them.  Intently looking around for movement I see a dark shape come up onto the gravel bed.  “there’s one!!!”  oh.  That’s pretty big!   oh.  That’s a bull shark!!!  He was about 1m long and just cruised straight up to my kayak, hung around for a bit nearly right under me and then just kept cruising around the shallows.  I threw a popper near it and it came up and had a good look but didn’t take it straight away and I didn’t really persist as it would be an unfair fight with my overkill 12lb leader!!! He stayed around for a bit until I turned on my camera, then he went back into the deeper pool of course!!!.  

Blurry $5.95 fake chubby

Oh well, that was cool, and worth the rain (it wasn’t too wet).  After that I had a few casts at some snags then decided to head upstream where i’d had more success in the past.  By the time I’d dragged up the first couple of gravel races it was starting to get dark so I moved back to the surface lures.  I started to get bream hits on the basscada nearly every cast but I only had single hooks and they weren’t hooking up, and they gave up after a few hits each cast.  I threw the cheap chubby at a snag to try and get a hook up and I did immediately except that this fish was long and thrashed around on the surface, a nice little flatty in the fresh water!!!

Nice flatty from the sweet water.

I continued up the creek and got a big surface hit/boof about 100m up from the flatty.  It was definitely a bass.  I had a few more casts at the snag. Didn’t get the bass but got a a persistent little bream.

persistent fella with a big stomach!

Now it was totally dark and things started to heat up.  I paddled a few hundred metres upstream to a tree covered pool with steep sides that had usually produced in the past.  It was quite hard to cast as it was pitch black and there are lots of trees hanging down to the water in spots.  First cast under the trees got a nice hit.  I paused, no follow up hit so I twitched the basscada a bit then continued the crawling retrieve.  No strike, so I cast back into the same spot.  I wound about 2 feet and then smack!!!!   I was on.  Everything tightened up and line began to pull off the reel and I was promptly pulled straight in under the trees.  Trying to keep my rod low to keep it from snagging I copped a face full of branches while keeping the fish from going back into the logs below!!  I was able to push myself out of the branches and then bring the fish in to the yak while out in the clear.  He put up a nice fight but kept it clean and came into the net with a bit of prompting!  When he laid down next to a ruler he was 43cm, my pb bass!!! Got some pics and now he’s currently back out there adding cm by cm so that I can get him when he’s over 50cm!!!  

PB bass- 43cm and nice and healthy looking.

mmmmm that's a tasty looking basscada!

After that I was running out of time but for the next 30 mins I got at least a hit from every place I tried (mostly bream hits) and got another two bass (both around 34cm) and a bream. 

Another feisty little bass - 34cm

It’s great to be back into some bass for the first time this summer and great to find them again healthy and fat in my local!!  It was also cool to catch flathead, bream, bass AND see a bull shark all within a few hundred metres of each other!!

Well this post should have been a paddling report but the day didn’t go to plan but did present an opportunity do some exploring that I’d been keen to do for a while.

 
The day started at 6:50am when I left Sawtell for Platypus flats on the nymboida river. The plan was to meet a mate Tom (a fellow rafting guide who had camped up there overnight with his family) to run safety for his raft which would be holding various blood relatives, one of which was celebrating being a year older than last year.

When I arrived at 8:45am I was promptly informed that we had a slight problem! A number of thoughts immediately went through my head……’There’s not enough paddles’ ‘The pfd’s don’t fit’ ‘Tom forgot the raft’ ‘The river ran out’ ‘The platypuses have had too many puggles and blocked up the rapids’……but it was none of these!! The problem was that Tom had been up all night vomiting and being generally not asleep or well!

We decided that it would be the smart thing to leave the paddling for another day, and contrary to previous trends and precedence we opted for the smart choice. This left me 2 hours and 800 vertical meters from home with no-one to paddle the river with me.

So having already made the trip up the hill i decided to have an explore  at  a couple put ins I’ve been wanting to check out.  

1st I had a look at access to the nymboida from the norm jolly grove above the beilsdown river.  I couldn’t really find a track down to the river and having no map the only sensible thing to do was just keep going down hill.  So I found a little creek and followed it for over an hour from where it had no water to where it spilled over a 10m waterfall into the nymboida river.  Was i nice hike in the end.  Some cool spots and had lunch on some rocks in the middle of the nymbo.  Also came upon a lyre bird really close and it freaked out and started screaming like a person as it flew off, kinda freaky.  

The baby creek starts to carry some water!

The nymbo.

Relaxing spot for a rest and lunch!

Hundreds of years of wood covered in moss!

This one was upright and 8m around the trunk.

After 3hrs and only 4 leaches I was back at my car and off to my next mission.

I’ve been wanting to get to cedar falls for a while to check out a way of puting into rosewood creek with our kayaks.  It’s supposed to be a great run through almost untouched old growth forest.  I decided to run the track as it was 3pm and the track was supposed to be a 3.5hr walk.  The track is great!  I basically drops you down a ridge so that you end up at the base of cedar falls which is about half way down the dorrigo escarpment.  Basically Rosewood runs off the plateau and  drops about 200 vertical metres in nearly one go.  Here are some pics from the bottom of cedar falls which is about half way down the escarpment.

cedar falls pools

view looking up at cedar falls

from the next step down

looking down from the same spot as the last pic

There were a whole lot of fish in the pools in the middle of this nearly vertical drop don’t know whether they got UP or Down there.

Managed to find some eels!

some kind of gudgeon i think?

I managed to run back to the start in less than 30mins as it was getting dark by the time I’d finished exploring.  I also managed to get really close to two different lyre birds.  I got some video of them feeding from only metres away which I was pretty stoked with too.

So after a day that started with “we’ve got a bit of a problem”, it ended up a pretty fun day to enjoy by myself and I’m now really keen to try rosewood creek after some rain!!

worleybird

ps.  I’m still itchy as from the many ticks that became apparent over the next few days.

Well this is the beginning of “The Local Adventures of Worleybird” (tLAW).  Sitting in front of the Shaun Micallef program is not conducive to writing a cohesive or interesting first post for a blog, but it IS telling of the quality you will get from this blog…. total and utter professional amateurism!!!

Anyway.  On to the topic of tLAW.  Mainly I started this blog cause I was writing numerous accounts and posting many pics of the same adventure on several different forums and with not the fastest internet connection and many limits to 3 pics per post etc it was very tedious uploading my adventures.  So, in a victory for total laziness tLAW was born and will now become……

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!    (Micallef! It’s so hard to look away!!)

(cont.)….tLAW will now become the primary place to post my adventures and I will link them to appropriate forums with sneak peak pics.

Anyway, just so we can start off I’ll do an update of the Life Adventures of Worleybird.

Worleybub was born at very young age!

Later in life I went on to play a major role as a child star in this photo.

Through a combination of respiration and mitosis, no thanks to a lack of support from school bullies, I slowly grew into an adult human male.  During this growing stage I became convinced that not only was the bible true, but that Jesus was the answer to everything that’s wrong with me and this world.  I decided that living for God would be most important in my life.(even more important kayaking or girls or family even!!) Click here for what I believe, or just talk to me!

After about 24 human years (unknown real years) I had almost completed a Marine Science Degree and 2 years of training at my local church.  It was after this in 2004 that I started work as an adventure tour guide in Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia and my love for kayaking and whitewater began.

I had always grown up around water. windsurfing, surfing, wakeboarding etc.  

worleybird in NSW wavesailing final.

woopi final 2007

With this new job my love of water grew even more as I trained up as a rafting guide as well as a sea kayak and surf rafting guide. (Ironically I get really cold, even in the warmest of water and I abhor sand, sand on stuff or any kind of bodily sandiness!! )

Centre drop - Nymboida river

centre drop again just a bit less boat!

It was during this period I met and married my wife….Well when I met her she wasn’t my wife- so really it should be ‘during this period I met a total stranger who became my friend and then as the relationship grew we decided to get married and she became my wife.  (imagine that.  Married a total stranger!!)

Through my in laws I was provided with a sit on top sea kayak to use and a seed was planted that would grow into another full blossoming hobby.  Kayak fishing!  Since then I have enjoyed many fishful and fishless trips in around the beautiful coffs coast.

Ready to go-charlesworth bay.

wonder what the best whale lure would be?

not a bad day off sawtell.

GT in kalang river.

Some big fish.

And little fish!

Next to grow was the gripping fever that is whitewater kayaking!  After guiding on the nymboida river and becoming very interested in hard boating (rafters reference to whitewater kayaking) I finally bit the bullet and got the antidote (of sorts).  I bought my very own kayak around easter 2009.  Below is  a vid that describes the first few months of kayaking.

My baby boat learning to swim!

Now that you’re updated/forewarned you can either look forward to the next adventure or, delete your history and cache so that you never come here again, even accidentally.

worleybird