A double bunger of blue swimmers with some already in the holding pen
Greetings!
A week or so ago one of the Fishing & Reef Tour Specialist’s crew, Morro and I took a well deserved break on Botany Bay. The fishing was tough and the Bay looked like a mess with the Desalination Plant being built. It’s hard to say whether this is a contributing factor to Botany Bay’s fish drought but on the surface of the water it truly looks like an environmental disaster with sections of the Bay kept boat free with weird looking floating objects snaking their way from one side to the other. Progress? I’m not so sure…
Anyway all was not lost as before we went fishing we threw out ten witches hats to try and jag some Blue Swimmer crabs. With Xmas coming on it seemed very appropriate. In NSW there is a limit of five witches hats per person so we were at our limit. At the end of the day we lifted the traps and were rewarded with 6 reasonable size crabs. Success! These were all headed for the freezer and then the pot.
But what is the story behind the Blue Swimmer crab?????
Well the Blue Swimmer crab (or Portunus Pelagicus) is part of the Portunidae family which also includes those sensational eating mud crabs that I’m yet to set a trap for this summer in the Georges River. The widest part of the crab, the carapace or shell, can grow up to 21cm and their claws can have a span of up to 80cm. They can weigh up to a kilogram. As their name suggests they are very good swimmers and their last two “legs” act as paddles. The paddles also have a tendency to snag the netting of a good witches hat! Males have a narrow pointed tail flap on the underside of their shell whereas a female has a wider, more rounded flap. Males also have blue elongated pincers whilst females have shorter grey/brown pincers.
In the autumn months the male crab begins to court the female for four to ten days by carrying her beneath him and fighting any other crab that comes near. Apparently the male assists the female in moulting her shell and turns her over to mate when she is still soft shelled. Afterwards he still protects the female for another three or four days to allow her shell to harden before dumping her and chasing other female crabs. Interestingly the female retains the sperm until the following summer when her ovaries are fully developed. This could also explain why most fisheries compel fisherman to release all female crabs regardless whether they appear to be carrying eggs or not.
A female blue swimmer crab will produce between 180,000 and two million eggs (I still don’t know who counts these things!) and carry them on her abdomen. Such a crab is said to be “berried”. The eggs will change from orange to black and will be incubated for about 18 days. The female will shake away the mature eggs which hatch into what is known as “zoea”. These float in the tide for four to six weeks and can be swept up to 80km out to sea. Most fall prey to other marine creatures but a small percentage make it to shallow nursery areas where they grow and moult numerous times before becoming the size of a 10c coin and taking on the shape of a crab. At this stage they are known as Megalopae and each time they moult they can increase their size by 20% and their weight by as much as 80%.
By autumn they are between 3 to 6cm in width and by winter they are at least 9cm wide. The winter months slows down their growth and before their last moult the females will mate with a male for the first time and start the whole cycle off again.
I am always amazed at the amount of male blue swimmers that are caught as opposed to females. I estimate that it’s probably in the ratio of 10 males to one female. This may be because the females are “busy” with their male partners whilst the males are more likely to be out foraging for food. If you have some theories on this I’d be happy for you to make a comment below.
Fishing & Reef Tour Specialists complete with Ugly Shirts at Sydney Airport
Greetings all!
Well this week Skipper Meggs had the opportunity to head south to (very!) sunny Melbourne but unfortunately not with rod and reel in tow. Isn’t it terrible when business gets in the way of a good fishing trip?
Anyway, for our past few (major) fishing holidays the Fishing & Reef Tour Specialist crew have packed their bags and rod tubes and made our way out to airports to be flown all around the country to exotic fishing locations in the far north. We’ve been on aircraft small and large and to date have had no issue or major hiccups.
So there I was on Monday around 6am at Sydney airport wondering why there was such a crowd in the place at this time of year. Thankfully I was flying with Virgin and the issue was with Jetstar – their reservation systems were down and as such they had to manually check passengers onto flights. Although there was a minor delay of half hour with my flight it was probably nothing in comparison to the poor people who (intended) to fly with Jetstar that day.
My wife and I went to Thailand earlier this year and although we could have got a direct flight in and out of Phuket on Jetstar our travel agent recommended a Thai Airways flight. They were concerned that there would be issues with the Jetstar flights and didn’t want to take any risks. We flew Thai.
I was also booked on a Virgin flight on the way back to Sydney from Melbourne. You wouldn’t read about it but on Tuesday the exact same issue (reservation system outage) happened to Virgin at Melbourne airport. I believe that this was a major problem and perhaps not as easily fixed as the Jetstar issue as some 50 flights had to be canceled on Tuesday as a result. The flow on effect for me on Wednesday was that my flight was delayed for an hour and a half which meant that I was forced to drink my Virgin Lounge membership almost dry before take off. I was lucky enough to be seated in an exit row and I took advantage of the additional leg room to have a well deserved snooze. Every Wednesday night I head down to have a drink at the local club with a few mates and I eventually arrived there at around 9:45pm.
Anyway, there’s very little you can do in these situations. All you can be thankful for is that they happen on business trips and not fishing ones. And as you can see from the video above things could have been much worse!
Posted by Meggs | Uncategorised | Posted on December 11th, 2009
Illegal video recording at Fleetwood Mac. Note the vacant seat to the front left.
Greetings all,
After my post on the Danny Green and Roy Jones Junior fight I’ve been asked to provide commentary on other things that interest fellow fisher persons. One thing that has always accompanied my Fishing & Reef Tour Specialist crew on our holidays (apart from great times and big fish) is music.
In fact last Saturday night we all went down to the local club to help The Radiators celebrate their 30th anniversary along with Spy v Spy, Jenny Morris and The Screaming Jets. Mi Sex were also suppose to play but apparently a couple of them are sick and one reportedly is not long for this world. Those of you in the know would already be aware that their lead singer died in the 90’s in a car accident up on the NSW north coast. Anyway it was a sensational night and I managed to win an amp in a raffle. But I digress…
During the week I had the honour to take my darling wife along to see Fleetwood Mac. Now I’d be the first to say that they were not my style of band and I wasn’t looking forward to it but I must say it was one of the best concerts I’ve been to. I spent seven years in the music business so I have seen a heap of acts in my time but the Mac put up a terrific show for over two and half hours and two encores.
But that’s not the story.
We had pretty good seats. For those of you who have been to Acer Arena we were seated just off the floor in one of the two seater rows next to the tunnel entrance to the flat. By the way unlike the Danny Green fight we were able to buy 4 beers at a time at the Fleetwood Mac concert. Typical I was driving! Anyway Ella Hooper from Killing Heidi now in band called The Verses was the warm up act and a couple of old guys in front of us were seated with a brief case on their laps. Hmmm straight from work I thought.
Well as soon as Ella started singing up popped the brief case and one of the guys took out his telescopic lense and started taking pictures. I thought that was a bit rude because obviously he wasn’t sanctioned by the band or Acer Arena to do so but freelancers will do what freelancers do. What happened when Fleetwood Mac started was another story altogether though….
His mate pulled out what looked like an oversize camera but with the display on the back I could tell it was a video camera and he proceeded to tape the entire show. What’s more I cottoned onto the fact that the seats in front of them were occupied by only one person which meant that both photographers had an uninterrupted view of the performance for their cameras. For a total cost of just under $800 they had secured four seats and used three and were able to pull off a scam that would put the old Asian trick of videotaping live film productions at the movies to shame. One wonders how much of a paycheck these guys would pull for making it happen.
I was pretty p&*ssed of at these guys and motioned the security guy to come and check. He confiscated the camera with the telescopic lense (you are allowed to have a camera) but when he questioned the other guy he gave him the story that it was just a camera not a video camera (all he had to do was switch modes!). These guys were good at their craft.
I would not be surprised that the footage as we speak will be available out of China right now.
It got to me so much that I leaned forward and told the guy with the video that he was burning a hole in my retina with his video camera (well I wasn’t that polite!) and all he did was bring it closer to him so I couldn’t see it. He didn’t want to cause a fuss, draw more attention and miss out on the footage. I could’ve called him anything under the sun and made rude remarks about his mum but it wouldn’t have mattered. All he was there for was to get the video. His equipment was obviously worth a fair bit of money. Even from where we were sitting he could get great close-ups and pan from side to side across the stage. It’s probably got great sound as well.
Anyway, that’s my story for this week – it’d be great to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience.
What an evening it was last night. Skipper Meggs, his younger brother and dad (an ex boxer himself) went off to the Danny Green fight. Let me tell you the story…
Well it was an early Xmas present for my dad and to be honest apart from a couple of Kick Boxing shows in Phuket I must admit that I had never ever been to a boxing match even though they have regular bouts at my local watering hole. I was always of the belief that there’d be more fights outside the ring than inside it.
We trained it in to Acer Arena and it was a fair walk for a 76 year old so by the time we made it inside the stadium it was right on beer o’clock.
That’s when the fun began.
My brother headed off to find an ATM as the ones outside the stadium weren’t working (that’s right 3 NAB ATM’s down at the same time!) and I lined up for beers whilst dad sat down to catch his breath. When I got to the bar a good 15 minutes later I was told I could only buy 2 beers and if I wanted 3 I had to get dad to come over. I told them (nicely) the poor old bloke was having a rest after the walk from the station but they insisted on not only seeing him but getting him off his chair and standing next to me. Once he was there I asked whether or not he could go back to sit down and the young barman said yes. Off he went and then the supervisor came back and asked for him to get back otherwise she couldn’t serve me. All this for 3 lousy beers – the first ones of the night!
Anyway, time went on and it soon became obvious that Acer Arena wasn’t even broadcasting the boxing matches outside the stadium itself ie if you weren’t seated inside and you wanted to get drinks or food there was no vision of the fights. Plenty of TV screens around telling you what events were coming to Acer but no footage of what was going on inside the venue! Since there was a two beer only rule in place the queues were a mile long. Needless to say I didn’t see much of the under card.
Even the gents was a farce – the toilets consisted of 4 personal urinals so even the blokes had to queue up to relieve themselves. Any guy with a sheet of corrugated iron and a bit of imagination would have seen this potential problem from a mile away. Someone complained and I pointed out that at 2 beers per person perhaps that’s all they needed.
There was a bloke in front of us that thought he’d beat the queues and got up to buy some beers just after the bell rang for round one of the Danny Green fight. Poor bloke missed the entire fight and couldn’t believe it! Whilst Roy Jones was on the ropes I asked ex-boxer dad whether it was in the rules that he was allowed to fight back but it was all too late and the fight was stopped. I lost a few dollars on the result and my brother has to spend the next couple of weeks making up the money he lost backing Roy Jones Junior.
Now a lot of you at this point would think that I’m having a bit of a moan but on the contrary I found the whole experience very entertaining. After all – who would want a night that goes really smooth with nothing to talk about. When the fight finished I lined up in the gents behind one of the four urinals and stated that we just paid $40 a minute to watch a fight. As quick as a flash one bloke said to us “Mate, what would you have said if you saw Bradman get out for a duck in his last match – that’s history and you would’ve been a part of it!”. Of course he was right. I was actually quite chuffed to have been there to see the 122 second bout.
We were right above the area where Danny Green came out of and the atmosphere was absolutely fantastic. Ok, it was over quicker than Green’s after fight speech but I was proud to be there with both my dad and my brother.
So where’s the connection with fishing holidays? Well sometimes they don’t work out according to plan either.
I remember one we had in South West Rocks for instance. Apparently the week before our charter boat was robbed and so they didn’t have much in the way of fishing gear. The fishing for the week was really quiet with only a couple of reasonable size spotted mackerel saving the day. But off the water there were so many things that made the trip fantastic. We took some surf lessons, had a beach decathlon and at one time sent the local golf pro off with our beer order in a golf buggy and he delivered it back to us by the time we got to the the third hole.
The thing is it’s not about the fight or the fishing in lots of ways it’s all about the journey and the experience.
Robert Louis Stephenson once put it this way… “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”.
