nhawi

Sal & I had a lovely time sailing up to Truant Island for a few days, we were blessed with the weather, a fresh South Easterly to sail up there on the Friday morning and then a light North Easterly from coming home on the Sunday. It was a bit too light at first and we had to motor sail for the first hour or so until it freshened a little.

Truant is one of our favourite spots, because its well offshore, about 32nm North of Gove harbour, it tends to have very clear water and there is lots of beautiful coral reef around the island to snorkel and spearfish on as well as lovely white beaches.

We caught a nice mackerel trolling on the way up so we had fresh fish and we really just had a very relaxing few days lazing about, swimming, sun baking, exploring in the tinny, fishing and snorkelling.

I found the track of a small croc which had come up the beach overnight and gone into a freshwater lagoon behind the beach, a reminder that even this far offshore they are around. Lots of turtle tracks from the nesting season too.

My highlight was going in to the beach where we were anchored at low tide to look for oysters on the rocks, there werent really any decent sized oysters and I walked back out to the tinny and climbed in, just as I was about to pull the anchor in to head back to Lumiel (50m away), a pair of big Giant Trevally swam past, followed by a reef shark.

In a moment of madness that I almost instantly regretted, I grabbed the nearest rod, my little light weight flick stick with a calcutter 100 and a little slice for throwing at tuna. I sight cast the slice in front of the leading Giant Trevally – who immediately inhaled it!

Now I had a big GT hooked up, on light gear, in about 1m of water, anchored so i couldnt move to deeper water, surrounded by reef and with a shark to add spice to the chase. There were a few instantly obvious scenarios, in typical GT style, he could peel off enough line to cut me off on the reef, he could just set sail for the horizon and spool me, the shark could attack and chaos ensue, or the line would break as I increased the drag to sunset on the little reel.

Amazingly not of these scenarios played out, instead he pretty much stayed over the sand and while he fought hard for 10 minutes or so, I finally got him to the boat and lip gaffed him so I could release him. While I was battling the GT I had hooked up, its mate behaved in typical GT style – it swam over to the tinny and swum around under the boat the whole time. Part of the reason that I released the one I hooked.

I was yelling and carrying on like a pork chop during the battle and eventually Sal came up on deck to see what all the fuss was about so she caught the last couple of minutes on video.

All in all a fantastic weekend, great sailing, we didn’t break anything and it was lovely just the two of us having the island to ourselves for a few days. Of course we also enjoyed some delicious meals

The sail home was made all the more special by a small pod of dolphins joining us and playing in the bow waves.