Once home two dozen garfish and four squids was the "eating" result of day one and although to the lady's it didn't seem as we had been working very hard, it certainly felt much more tiring to us. The bad news was that even if dead tired the ladies wanted to go to Victor Harbour for New Year's eve to watch the movie "Apollo 13" at the drive-in. I can't tell you how much I hated that idea but we had to do it, so we did.

The weather really got upset with us and, on the way back at 1a.m, I had to cope with an incredibly thick fog all the way to CJ and luckily, I had driven through fog a lot in the past having lived for a few years in a region of Italy called "Emilia Romagna" where from November to March the fog is like the drizzle in England, it's always there.

Once home, not after having missed a few times the dirt road turn-off which we could not possibly see, we headed straight to bed with no intentions of waking up. I had had it by this time. A decision was made that we could not be bothered with an early start for New Year's day and that we would have assessed everything the next morning.

The next morning the weather had really turned quite nasty and we decided to go down and check the sea.

On arrival at the ramp the only trailer in the car park was the one of a 30 footer who had a charter trip and that was leaving the marina as we got there looking more like a submarine trying to immerse itself into the sea than a boat. I bet the Glenelg ferry to Kingscote was cancelled on the 1st January, we thought we were on holiday and could not be bothered, plus the pots were well baited and would probably have more chance of success with 2 nights then with 1 so we went back home and spent the day with the wives visiting Deep Creek Conservation Park and going through some very nice 4WD trucks. Going to the south of the park and looking at the coast and at those very nasty southern ocean swells curling and breaking made us feel so good to be on "terra ferma" that we did not miss being on the water, not even a bit.
Day 3 was Tuesday and although the sea had definitely improved from the previous day it was still far from being pleasant. A trip to the south coast of the island was definitely out and with the pots on the north coast out of Emu Bay it was a matter of having to repeat day one. As we headed north we decided not to trawl but to inspect one area that on the chart looked interesting.

We discovered a 3-4 metre ledge and after working it we started fishing it. In the beginning we started pulling a few rock species but the type of rock species was a good sign. Yes, most of you might say how can you be happy of landing rock fish but the truth is that, in most of the area populated by the KG whiting in the southern part of the gulf, including Investigator Straight and Backstairs Passage, KG are sharing the same ground with certain type of fish and seeing the right type made me realised that there was good potential here but that we had to work it harder in order to understand it well.

These are the time where the difference between a good fisherman and a bad one is evident. Most fishermen would be anxious to wet a line without realising that the hard part of fishing is instead to locate the fish and that infact, once located, 3 blokes (and I mean any blokes not just good fishermen) can pull 50 whiting in a matter of 30 minutes. So why not spend 2 to 3 hours searching for the fish then.

We spent most of the day trying to located the whiting and understanding the bottom features of this new area totally unknown to us until then. By the end of the day we finally got 2 decent size whitings (not a very successful morning fishing by anyone standard, but at least we did get to know where they were and the area very well).

At around 11:30a.m we realised that even though the wind was still quite blowing conditions would have only deteriorated with the afternoon sea breeze, so if we didn't want to leave the pots there another day, our only hope was for a very quick trip to the grounds of Investigator Straight as soon as possible and straight back into the shelter of the Fleurieu peninsula.

Conditions on this day were quite a bit nastier and on arrival at our grounds we were greeted by a defined 2-3 metre sea with the odd scary pattern and I was real glad that we had left Rapid Bay area right at the start of the incoming tide which was going to keep tide and wind in the same direction for the remaining 6 hours.

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