The rush of adrenalin in the few hours preceding a planned fishing trip is always the same, the only difference being that this time instead of driving the boat, I am towing it and I must tell you that is not an easy task. I generally don't tow it very far and putting it on the Island Seaway had always been a real dream.

The 15 minute towing trip from North Haven to Port Adelaide was all it took to get the boat to Kingscote but now those 15 minutes have become 5 to 7 hours. I must admit though that I have gotten so used to expect illogical decisions out of the government of this country that nothing surprises me any longer, but lets get back to fishing.
After a 12 hour trading day in the city on Friday, I am finally home and although tired, I am so happy I cannot stay still. Unfortunately due to work commitments I hadn't had any time to get things organised, so it had been thanks to my fishing companion Vince that I had been able to get everything organised.

Vince had 3 days off prior to our departure and we had used the few evenings leading to that date to work on the engines (a very important part of my boating time). It was Saturday the 30th December and everything was ready. I met with Vince and Leanne at the CYC and we started preparing the boat.

After a few stops for ice and bait, we were finally at our last pick up site to collect my wife and daughter and our next stop was going to be Cape Jervis. The first impression was good, the place where we were staying was excellent and the temperature had dropped from 35 degrees in Adelaide to around 20 but we didn't seem to mind very much at that stage.

The weather wasn't looking good for the next day and a quick check with my friend Terry at the weather bureau confirmed my worse feeling, a few days of strong south easterly and no hope of good weather. But we have got a week and we have to get some decent weather ( we then thought). After having unpacked we decided to leave the ladies to look after the house and we headed down to check the sea and the ramp.

The wind had already picked up, and although the excellent rough water capability of my boat, I was so tired because of the past Christmas trading and of the recent towing that the thought to head south into that sea first thing in the morning was not that exciting, so we decided that we would spend the first day north of CJ towards Rapid Bay.

This area is very sheltered in the south easterly as well as being waters that I'd never fished so the idea to find (haunts) some fish was very exciting, after all that is what I really enjoy about this sport. 'Catching them is easy once you've found them (According to Bill`s gospel 1,3,24). So we headed back home very happily and after a good meal, we went to bed for an early start. On arrival at the ramp we were greeted by a very nasty 20-30 knots south easterly with white caps that were visible from the hill on top of CJ, and when that happens you can bet that Backstairs Passage is not a pleasant place to be in.

We decided to leave the cray pots in the boat because going north it looked very calm and they would not create a real problem on the deck in reasonably calm waters. After the usually simple launching of a Cat, regardless of its size, we were on our way towards Rapid Bay and although we new far out it would've been rough where we were it was like being in a swimming pool.

We decided to trawl for some snooks so we set the outriggers and sat back waiting for a strike. May be the over cast weather, or may be the falling barometric pressure but of the snooks there was no sign. Approximately an hour later we reached Rapid Head and having had no strikes we decided to anchor just off of it and set a burley trail hoping to catch some gars to use for live bait on the famous Rapid Bay Kingies.

Not even 2 seconds after Vince had lowered the first line into the burley trail and a double header of garfish was in the live bait tank. I quickly set the live gar on my TLD 30 suspended by a balloon 200 metres behind the boat and while waiting started fishing the bottom ledge for some rock species to use as baits for the cray pots, while Vince kept landing double headers of gars. Dinner was starting to look pretty good thanks to his efforts when we noticed that the balloon had disappeared.

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