Skipper Meggs Amidships
Too much fun on and off the water

The Legend of a Bream called Trevor – Part 3

Posted by Meggs | Fishing Holiday Stories | Posted on October 20th, 2009

Greetings fellow fisherpersons,

Well, if the Pacific Dawn ever makes it back to Sydney I will be making the trip to Vanuatu very soon. Apparently we’ve been delayed a day and so we will miss out on going to Luganville which is a real shame because a mate of mine use to run a plantation there and I was looking forward to catching up with his friends and seeing the local town. Better luck next time I suppose.

I will be away until the 1st November so in the meantime I’ll leave you with the third part of the “Trevor” story. I hope you enjoy it!

But what to do? After chatting to a kind old bloke on the wharf, I decided to pack up the kids and head for the nearest tackle shop for the official weigh in. Two point four kilos on the lie detector later I decided that the next thing to do was to take some photos, capture the scene on video and then display the carcass to as many of my detractors as possible.

Unfortunately there was no film in any of our cameras – except for one belonging to Alisha. Alas I was to find out months later that Alisha had developed a habit of opening the camera many times “to check on the film”. So, after covering more angles of the fish than even a Playboy shoot would allow and after paying extra for one hour development of the prints, the professional opinion of the photography world was that the shots were over exposed.


For weeks after that I was one shattered unit.

The video was a different proposition. Why hell, I could tape over the bits of old holiday footage with shots of me with more hair and less weight (these two things always seem to be diametrically opposed as one gets older) and the newly acquired big screen TV could show the mighty bream in stunning Technicolor. Well that was the theory as I panned in close with the “Battery Low” light glowing red below the eye piece just long enough to get a flick of the tail and a gulp from the struggling bream.

Slightly annoyed I put the fish on ice and headed off to a friend’s house for more photo opportunities and some shameless self indulgence. Receiving same (but only one photo courtesy of the “Oh my gosh, I’ve run out of film syndrome”) I moved onto the next port of call: the brother-in-law’s.  With no one home I decided to display the fish to his next door neighbour Keith – a keen Botany Bay fisho from way back.

“Keith’s not home dear. What sort of fish is that anyway?” enquired Keith’s Mrs with a kind of “Yawn, I could be watching Oprah” tone in her voice.

It was pointless. I was a beaten man. There was a trophy fish in my esky and it seemed I would be banished to a lonely world of self aggrandizement.  However, with renewed video camera batteries Alisha and Grant helped me capture some truly magic moments on tape  including the scaling, gutting and ritual examination of the stomach contents. But this fish was not headed for the freezer. There was only one thing that would justify plucking it from the murky depths of the Georges River.

That evening, Fast Eddie the Fireman and his sweet wife Suzie, joined the kids and I in a celebration of  unbridled gluttony as we ate the tender flesh of the one-wine-and-stubby-bottle-long barbecued bream that in a moment of alcoholic induced inspiration we had come to call Trevor.

“He looks like a Trevor,” announced Fast Eddie convincingly.

Naturally, the Sunday Telegraph that weekend gave away a rod and reel to someone who had sent a photo of a 1.8kg bream and I sighed with disgust at my lack of foresight.

But here’s a checklist for what you can do to make the most of that unexpected catch;

·    Get the fish officially weighed
·    Buy some film, take many photos and hold the fish out in front of you
·    Ring the local newspaper – they may run a story and send a professional photographer because it’s interesting press and good for tourism
·    Video footage is fantastic, if you haven’t got a video camera borrow one
·    A cast of your catch will cost a few hundred dollars but whatever you do, don’t scale or gut your fish. Professional taxidermists are listed in the Yellow Pages
·    Send the fish photos into TV, magazine and newspaper competitions

And if you’re really keen, you could cobble together your own story and shoot it off to some respectable blog like this one…..

Good fishing and good luck to all.

The Bombastic Bream Beater of Bankstown

Sea you later,

Skipper Meggs