I enjoy fishing but Sunday morning I saw some of the side-effects and I didn’t feel so good about it.
We were diving at Rye …
… (which we had meant to do as a night dive the previous evening but TORRENTIAL rain made setting up equipment a less fun prospect, not to mention the stormwater drains gushing out bacteria and sediments. There was so much rain our usual campside was under 15cm of water that was having hard time sinking into the parched, sandy, hydrophobic soils. Instead we took refuge in the house and drank tea and ate cookies! But, in this town, you don’t complain about rain ;) especially not when you planted 40 saplings last spring :)
…ANYWAY, about 5 or 10 m from the pier we come across this cutey:
It’s a juvenile Port Jackson shark. The poor thing was tethered by the hook stuck in it’s mouth. I guess the line broke or it was cut too far up because a swivel further up the line had caught on some weed… Ross has a go at removing the hook (we’d forgotten at that point about the barbs by their dorsal spines, but he didn’t get spiked so all was well!). He couldn’t get the hook out but he broke the line so the poor thing could swim away… it didn’t fight much and it swum away quite slowly; I hope the hook rusts out soon and that it hadn’t been too weakend…