Article by Capt. Franky Pettolina
This past October I was sitting in my truck when my cell phone rang. It was my friend Capt. Ron Gladkowski of the “Reel Instigator”. We talked for a few minutes just to catch up. He asked how my Mom and Dad were doing. He and Dad would always give each other a hard time about their similar Philadelphia backgrounds. After our small talk was done Ron told me that he needed to schedule an insurance renewal survey on his boat. The “Reel Instigator” was due to be hauled for the season sometime later in the month. I told him I would get it on my list, but that I was heading to Australia at the beginning of November and it might not be until after I got back. He told me that would work fine and wished me luck on my trip.
Little did I know that would be the last time I would speak to him. Two days later I saw a Facebook post from one of his family members saying that he had passed away. The pictures accompanying the post showed some of the things Ron was passionate about. A Philadelphia Eagles helmet, a Michelob Ultra, an Ocean City Marlin Club sticker and Ron holding a fish. There is no doubt that those were a few of Ron’s favorite things.
The thing that I will always remember about Ron is how he was always surrounded by his friends and family. They were truly his whole world. The fishing, football and other accompaniments just happened to fit in nicely. I would like to dedicate this article to my friend Ron.
About three hours into the flight from Los Angeles to Brisbane I realized that the 787 Dreamliner was incredibly misnamed. A more appropriate name would be something like the 787 Sardine Can or the 787 People Crammed Into a 650 Person PlaneLiner! But I was on my way to Australia to chase black marlin so the lack of comfort was well worth it. For those of you that do not know the geography let me bring you up to speed on what it takes to get to the Land Down Under.
My trip began with my airport transportation picking me up in West Ocean City at 5:30 AM East Coast time on Wednesday morning. From BWI my first flight was to Charlotte, NC. I was traveling with my good friend and long time charter client Brooke. In Charlotte we met up with his grandson Andrew who would be joining us on our adventure. The flight from BWI to Charlotte was not bad. About an hour and a half. We had a couple hour layover in Charlotte before heading to Los Angeles. We arrived at LAX after a five and a half hour flight. It was around 6:00 PM West Coast time. Our flight to Brisbane did not board until 11:30 PM. Thankfully, Brooke convinced the nice lady at the Qantas Airline business lounge to let us all in under his Premiere membership. The layover passed in relative comfort with plenty of snacks and drinks. Then it was on to Hell Flight. Flying time from LAX to Brisbane is right about 15 hours. Yes, 15! I shared my 900 minutes, give or take, of discomfort with a couple of newlyweds from New York City. Thankfully the young bride was in honeymoon mode and snuggled closely to her hubby for most of the trip. I was fortunate not to be seated next to a big smelly oaf like myself! You may be asking what someone does to pass the time on such a lengthy flight. I don’t sleep well on planes so I took advantage of the Qantas inflight entertainment library built into the seat back in front of me. Right in front of me. Like eight inches away from my face in front of me once the passenger in front of me reclined the seat. Which they did about five minutes into the trip. I watched Jaws, Caddyshack, I Feel Pretty, Tag, Ant Man and the Wasp and The Spy Who Dumped Me. Following that cinematic marathon the plane landed in Brisbane around 7:00 AM Friday morning Australia time. Australia time is fifteen hours ahead of East Coast time. We cleared into the country and had another two hour layover before our flight to Cairns. Our final flight from Brisbane to Cairns was about 3 hours. Our driver greeted us as we walked out of the airport and had us to the Pullman Reef Hotel and Casino about fifteen minutes later. All said and done, I was checked into my room almost exactly 41 hours after I had walked out of my front door.
Brooke, Andrew and I got ourselves cleaned up and decided to take a walk down the waterfront in Cairns to scare up some food. We settled on an outdoor café that had mud crab and lobsters in tanks on display and a menu with plenty of options. A mud crab is like our Maryland blue crab, but about quadruple the size. Knowing that they don’t serve them with Old Bay and Natural Lights I opted not to have the mud crab. Instead I had a combination platter of kangaroo and crocodile steaks. Andrew also has a sense of adventure when it comes to trying new food and he had the same platter plus broiled barramundi (Asian sea bass). Brooke, on the other hand, played it safe and had some pasta with jumbo shrimp. On the walk back to the hotel we made big plans to hit the casino after we took a late afternoon nap. Even with the power of youth on his side, Andrew didn’t follow through on this plan. I woke briefly around midnight and the next thing I knew it was 6:30 Saturday morning! Brooke also slept straight through from the afternoon. Jet lag beat out the casino!
Our plans for Saturday involved meeting with our driver from the day before to take us up to Cooktown to meet our boat and crew. Cooktown is about a 40 minute flight or a four hour drive. We were told that the drive is quite scenic and we took that option, thankfully. Good and bad luck evened out in the end, so they say, and we definitely hit a couple pieces of good luck. I wasn’t going to activate Australia as part of my cell phone plan because I thought it would be nice to be off of the grid for a few weeks. Practicality, however, made me realize that I couldn’t go incommunicado for that long and at the last minute I turned on the Australian package. Had we chosen to fly to Cooktown instead of drive, or if I had not turned on my phone, I would not have gotten the Facebook message from our Captain’s wife telling me that the boat was no longer in Cooktown. It was right there in Cairns! She had been emailing and calling Brooke for two days, but he is truly incommunicado. He got rid of his flip phone a few years ago because he didn’t like it. That’s right, no cell phone period (there are times that I am jealous of that, but this was not one of them!) So an hour and a half into our ride to Cooktown we had to about face and head back to Cairns.
Our luck held out and we were able to book two rooms at the same hotel for the night. That gave us all day Saturday to kill in Cairns. We went to the famous Cock and Bull, home of the Cairns Big Game Fishing Club, for lunch. It is one of the coolest places I have ever been. All sorts of fishing and hunting memorabilia cover the walls. Mounts of grander black marlin, tiger and great white shark jaws, lions, assorted antlered creatures, old tackle, old photos, you name it. I could have spent many more hours there and not seen everything. The beer was plenty cold too!
Once we finished up lunch we went down to the Esplanade in Cairns and spent the afternoon checking out the shops, street vendors, scenery at the local public pool (which is huge and quite “well populated” on the weekends) and finally the statue commemorating the first grander black marlin ever caught in Cairns. It was an unexpected day of sight seeing and it also served to alleviate any remains of jet lag from the day before. We had a nice dinner at the hotel and turned in early so we would be well rested when we got on the boat the next morning.
There are a couple of options when it comes to fishing for black marlin on the Great Barrier Reef. A single day trip is one, but not a good one. The fish are not very active in the morning and the best spots are at least an hour from the marina, more likely several hours, and you would miss out on the best bite while returning to the marina. Few serious anglers choose this option. The other two options are a Mothership and Game Boat or a live-aboard Game Boat. We chose the latter. This was an extremely pricey trip to begin with and the Mothership option would have tripled the fishing cost at the very least!
At 9:00 AM on Sunday morning we climbed aboard the “Bounty Hunter”, a 43-foot O’Brien built in Australia. That would be the last time we touched terra firma for a week. Our crew consisted of Capt. Ross Finalyson and deckhands Kyle Vannatta and Dave-O Borges. Ross is an Aussie and Kyle and Dave-O are both from Kona, Hawaii. Brooke and I had fished with Ross in 2007. Brooke also had been with him a time prior to that in 2005. This was Dave-O’s second season with Ross, and Kyle’s first. I have always felt that there is a fraternity among men of the sea and I quickly felt a kinship with our crew. Ross and I have kept in touch via social media since my first trip to The Reef. Kyle and Dave-O are a couple of decades younger than me, but we had several mutual friends in Kona. Between our love of fishing and common buddies we hit it off well from the beginning.
The 2018 heavy tackle season in Australia will go down in history as one of the best big fish seasons in history. There were several fish over 1,100 pounds weighed, including an 1,140 that Ross and the boys caught a couple weeks before our arrival. “Granders” are a magical thing in the marlin fishing community and there is a saying among the crews over there in Australia. “If you didn’t weigh it, don’t say it. Anybody can touch a leader.” This basically means that you don’t take credit for releasing a Grander. You call it a “950 plusser”. Now this is not always strictly adhered to, but the crews that have weighed several monsters will tell you that there are many 850 pounders that get called a Grander to let braggarts puff up their chest and to make an inexperienced crew look more experienced. Especially on social media. My goal for the week was to join the Grander Club.
A writing class I took one time started with the instructor saying that Alice fell down the rabbit hole very early in the story “Alice In Wonderland.” The point is to get on with it right away. Let the reader know where the story is going. Unless you are writing a suspense thriller. This article isn’t a suspense thriller, so I will tell you right now that I didn’t get to join that club. The closest we came to a Grander was on our first day and I was not in the chair.
On day one we were fishing on the Linden Banks area off of the Great Barrier Reef. Our first two bites were smallish by Reef standards. 200 or so pound fish. Neither one came tight. Andrew was first up as angler since he had never caught a black marlin before. So when we finally came tight at 5:15 that afternoon Andrew was harnessed to the 130 pound class rod on our first fish of the trip. A few minutes into the battle I saw a hole open up in the water and a fish of dinosaur proportions erupt out of it. My first words were “She’s a good one!” Andrew did an admirable job for his first time heavy tackle fishing. He is a naturally gifted angler and it really showed on this fish. We got the leader for the first time around twenty minutes into the fight. The crew wanted to get a better look at the fish and we all wanted better pictures and video, so Kyle dumped the leader when the fish surged away from us. Another half hour or so brought the fish close again and Ross made the call to cut the leader this time as we didn’t want to tire the fish any further and attract the local shark population looking for an easy meal. The mission was accomplished though as we got some great video and a few really awesome photos of the fish. When the spray settled and victory beers were cracked open, Ross called the fish a very honest 900. He said it was close to the magical mark of four digits but not quite there. Still one heckuva fish for Andrew’s first black marlin.
Over the next six days we raised eight more black marlin and released four of them, giving us a total of five out of eleven bites for the week. All of the fish after that first one were in the 200 pound range. Not what I was hoping for, but still a really good week of big fish fishing. We also caught several wahoos, a mahi, a yellowfin and countless baitfish consisting of rainbow runners, scaly mackerel, scad and bonito. Actually, the yellowfin was bait too. The fish was probably 25 pounds or so just to give you an idea of the size of the baits we were using!
Capt. Ross and his crew are extremely talented and their composure while taking on these big fish was something to behold. Ross posts a fair amount of photos on Instagram and his website is australiangamefishing.com. Like I said earlier, this is an expensive trip and the travel is not for the faint hearted (the trip home was a little shorter- only 36 hours door to door), but I could not think of any place more qualified to be at the top of an angler’s wish list. I have started saving now with the plan of taking my wife to celebrate her retirement. Thankfully I have a few years to save up (like 12 of them to be exact).
I hope everyone has a great winter and finds some warm places to fish. I will be heading to Islamorada over the holidays so hopefully my first “Fish Story” in the spring has some fun Florida Keys adventures in it. I want to wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2019! See ya in the spring!
Capt Franky Pettolina is Co-Captain of the charter boat, “Last Call”, owner of Pettolina Marine Surveying, Inc. and multi-term President of the Ocean City Marlin Club.
