The result was magic and within a matter of 30 minutes everybody was back into the whitings and this time no rock cods.

A thank you at this time has to go to Vince, always capable of satisfying everyone's requests. Infact fishing from a boat should always be looked at as a joint effort and as a team work and never as a battle to see who gets the most fish. Having Vince doing the rigs made us catch fish even though he didn't.

Sometimes you might have 10 blokes catching heaps while another 2 are catching very little, but it still is very important to have those two catching nothing because they work like attractors to the rest of the school above all with whitings.

Back to fishing though, and things had slowed right down for everybody but having the eight rigs to reach comfortably the bottom made us decided to have another go at re anchoring, after all we were still exactly on the same spot that we were fishing on slack water and most of you readers will relate to my next 7 words, 'even though our baits, definitely weren't'.

Knowing how far back the lines were reaching the bottom we tried first to pull up some rope on the anchor but not having been able to still produce any results we opted for a full re anchoring. It is amazing to see how a bottom with plenty of colour around slack water becomes absolutely bear naked, or more like a desert, when the tide starts racing.

But what actually happens to the fish? surely they are not going miles away to then return miles back to these same grounds 3 hours later.

And that is the key to fishing, again acute observation of your bottom through your sounder. The fish had to be there. I decided to anchor on a part of the ledge that I thought would offer plenty of shelter to the fish from the incoming tide, And twice I was right. Within a matter of seconds from reaching the bottom, everyone of us was on and it was all whiting been landed. Unfortunately the anchor pulled out and we drifted off but this time it was clear that we knew exactly where the fish were so it was a simple matter to get back exactly on the spot and so we did.

The remaining 1 hour saw us catching the remaining approximately 50 whitings that we needed to reach our boat limit. There were smiles all around, David, Jonathan and Scott seemed to be having an absolutely ball and that gives a skipper immense pleasure.

The only other thing worth a mention was a first in my fishing experience. I had previously caught on several grounds around SA a beautiful fish commonly known in our waters as the Blue Devil.

Because of its beauty this fish has always been returned to the water as it seems a pity to have to kill such an absolutely beautiful creature. On this occasion though the funny thing was that David caught three different size ones within a few seconds from reaching the bottom on 3 consecutive casts.

Does that tell you something or what?

It certainly did to an excited observer as I am.

By now time was around 3:30p.m and it was time to start cleaning up the boat and head back home. So we set the auto pilot to steer the boat to the marina and took out brooms and brushes to start cleaning up. The trip home wasn't very long at all but it is always enjoyable to get back into the marina in a nicely cleaned boat.

Once we had pulled the boat out of the water I got everybody involved in the cleaning process. I asked Vince to organise a knife for each of them and got 4 people scaling and me filetting and within 1 hour, we had a nice bucket full of fresh fillets and no more worries of any work to be done once back home. We left half a basket with David, Jonathan and Scott and they then headed back to Adelaide with what I'm sure it would be a trip they wouldn't forget for a while.

To me and Vince the hard but logical decision to call it the end of this holiday considering that even if we had stayed another 2 days as planned we could have only had done the exact same fishing.

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