Creatures of the Deep

The last few days have been very exotic on the sea creatures front!

Firstly, before we left South West Rocks, I decided to have a final fish for half an hour in the river there. As I have mentioned before, I'm keen to catch me a pan sized fish on this trip, considering I haven't done so for a good 15-20 years I reckon. Anyhow, nothing was happening, and I was about to pack up and go back to the van when WHOMP, something walloped my line, and took off. Words cannot describe this moment - my fishing rod is bent pretty much in half, with the tip almost touching my hands. This monster is taking line off me at a great rate of knots, and I'm thinking I'm going to need to acquire a bigger frypan to cook this thing, then.... nothing. Line goes slack. Significantly rude words come out of my mouth, as I assume it's thrown the hook. I then proceed to wind in, and find that for some odd reason, my line is very heavy, but not with anything that feels remotely like a fish - more like a heavy rock or something. I figure this is odd, so I wind in, for maybe 30 metres until I see the line getting closer to the bank, then this thing explodes again, and jumps out of the water in front of my eyes, still atached to the end of my line. On the end of my line is a stingray, about 1.5metres long (including tail). Not wanting to "do a Steve Irwin", I got it into the bank, and cut the line as close as I could to the mouth of the ray. I spent the rest of the afternoon worrying about how the poor thing was going to deal with a hook in its mouth for the rest of its life, but then I googled, and found that over time, rays and other fish actually remove hooks from their mouths as they grow. I felt much better after I read this.

This afternoon at Port Macquarie, we saw dolphins playing at the entrance of the harbour. They were a fair way away, but there would have been maybe 6 or 7 of them I'd say, lazily playing in the shallows near the bar. Dolphins are awesome.

More impressive (to me anyhow) is what happened this afternoon after seeing the dolphins. The water around these parts (and the whole central and north coast, from what I can work out) is beautifully clear - so much nicer than anything my native Moreton Bay has to offer. I stood on the rock wall as the tide was coming in through the channel - which incidentally is a VERY strong current, as it is the only entry point for the entire inlet and river systems that feed from here - and watched a group of about a dozen Manta Rays slowly swim out to sea, against the current. They were almost diamond shaped, with a tail probably the same length as the body (possibly longer), reasonably dark grey in colour, and when they flapped their "wings" you could see the underside was a brilliant white colour. I have never seen ANYTHING like that in the wild, and I'm guessing I'm pretty unlikely to see it again. Sadly Anna was chasing Grace at the time, so was unable to see it as well, but it was pretty amazing - certainly unexpected! At least I didn't hook one this time...

(Addendum : After a bit of research, these were almost certainly stingrays, not manta rays. What is it with me and stingrays lately? I really need to borrow a pocket-sized "what fish is that?" book!)