Bermagui Revisited

I used to spend a lot of time in the Bermagui area, on the south coast of New South Wales. It's a beautiful place with a long maritime history, especially revolving around game fishing. Zane Grey put it on the map in 1936 when he spent several months there, caught a lot of striped marlin, and wrote eloquently about it.

This year, I revisited familiar places and old friends there. The work side of the trip was to monitor the annual game fishing tournament and to take biological samples from any fish that were brought to the weigh station (the great majority of fish are now tagged and released).

I've been doing this for many years, but over the past 7, have had funding to do so. This pays for travel and for training students in this aspect of fish biology. They love it, and, well, so do I.

This is one of only four marlin landed during the tournament. A nice striped marlin that Zane Grey would have been proud of.

Junior ('small fry') anglers had a special category. This is a striped tuna, more correctly known as skipjack tuna. It is one of the most prolific fishes in the world, and is the fish you eat whenever you open a can of tuna.

Striped tuna are very strong for their size, so catching one like this is worth a photo, eh?

Each year, I keep a look out for students who want to pursue a career in fisheries biology and give them some hands on experience in the gamefish fishery.

Karen Scott from Charles Sturt University has previously studied the diet of tiny freshwater gudgeons with tweezers, so being this close to a big marlin was a new experience. Good job, Karen!

And yes, the marlin was then filleted and frozen for future yummy meals.