Originally Posted by
Finished Business
I heard you chime in Stones, at least heard the name salty dog...we are still having problems with the VHF so we stayed quiet and just listened to what was cracking on the water. We were in a 22' North River...grey and black w radar on the arch.
Great report Dmurph, as always. Happy to hear you got into bottom fish to save the slow day. Big Ling too!
On a more...blood boiling note....at 6pm we rolled up to our prawn traps, about 30 yards from our bouy, its a BIG A3 polyform bouy...pretty hard to mistake it if it is not yours, looks a lot like a commi buoy so hard to make that mistake....but some shithead did! Again, we were 30 yards off our bouy, with no boats in the area. We were mounting up our puller and in rolls this big white, 30' cruiser, and sits right ontop of our bouy. COULND"T BELIEVE IT BUT this asshole starts backing his boat up to our bouy, boat hook at the ready, prepared to bring it on board! We nearly lost our minds! In the end we should have let them pick up the bouy and start pulling the traps, to catch them red handed, but our adrenaline wouldn't allow it so we stopped what we were doing, grabbed the wheel...nearly jumped the boat out of the water, and circled these pricks.
With my talking stick raised on high (gaff) I asked, rather coursely....What the F*** do you think you are doing!?!? In the broken english (ya you guessed it) an answer came back "oh we thought it was our trap"....I immidiately called BS, and at 6'4 with a gaff, they were inclinded to agree. (in my defence I was not brandishing the gaff, it just happens to be what we use as a boat hook to collect our bouys...just a matter of coincidence I had it on hand lol)
There was a police boat (the only other boat) in the area dealing with something about 500 yards off which we considered racing over to inform them of this boat, but since we did not let them actually pull the trap, we figured there was no evidence...next time we will let them pull it for sure. After pushing them off our one bouy, they continued on to look at our other bouys, and ended up pulling up one off in the distance...whether it was theres we could not be sure. Our traps soaked for 12 hours so who knows what happens in that time, BUT the trap line we scared them off us, once we pulled it was pretty baron of prawns and shrimps, and SOMEHOW the two bait cups in the lead trap were unscrewed, and the the rubber sinch strap was stretched over the mainline, not how we had rigged it by any means. We suspect they were pulling traps and cleaning out the first on that came up, and tossed it back.
I have pictures of the boat, and those on board, with numbers and names visible. Again, they didn't pull our trap because we jumped the gun, but they were backing up to our bouy, literally a boat hooks length away from the bouy when we confronted them. If you can't see that a 2ft diameter bouy is not yours from a meter away, something is fishy.
Will happily post the culprits if you guys think its warranted. I will leave it up to the jury!
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