San Remo fisherman Ray Dickie looks back on six decades at sea

Elder statesman of the San Remo fishing fleet, Ray Dickie, spoke to the Advertiser in 2018.

Ray – a former director and chairmen of the San Remo Fisherman’s Co-op – says fishing has changed considerably since he began in his teens about 60 years ago.

“Things are so much easier now – just the mod cons on the boat,” says Ray.

“When we went to Flinders Island there were no showers or toilets or anything like that.

“Now there’s showers, toilets, computers, televisions, phones, everything.”

He says for anyone to get into the industry now they need to buy or lease a boat, buy a licence, and either buy or lease a quota, all of which often adds up to more than $1 million.

A lifetime at sea

“I was born in 1936 and started fishing in 1951, though I’d been fishing from a dinghy before that.

“Dickie’s Bay” below Silverwater Resort is named after my family and is a great King George whiting fishing spot.

“I left school when I was 14 and worked on a few of the smaller couta boats. Then I got a job with Bert Johnson on the “Evening Star”, crayfishing. That’s how I got over the sea sickness.

“After World War 2 there were 50 to 60 couta boats fishing out of San Remo. Naturally there was a hell of a lot of fish caught. Some days’ catches were in the hundreds of wooden boxes and each box held about 70 pounds of couta. They were all caught on hand lines with a wooden lure. Before that the lures were white cow hide, but the couta caught just as well on wooden lures, and they were easier.

“A typical day would be to be out on the grounds just before daylight, because the fish always bit best right on dawn. The grounds were anywhere from Pyramid Rock to Kilcunda. Most couta boats only had one person on board.

“Before I started it was nearly all sail, but we had inboard motors. The boats were carvel built, between 20 and 30 feet long – most 24 or 25 feet.

“The couta were so thick that if our quota was 10 or 12 boxes we would have caught that by sunrise and be on our way home. Once we caught them we had to head and gut them. This was done mainly at sea, but sometimes at the jetty if we hadn’t finished by the time we motored home.

“There were heavy trolleys that ran around the jetty on rails. We’d load the boxes onto the trolley and wheel them up to the big sheds on the jetty. We’d put them into the shed, where there was an ice room. We’d get the ice, which was in blocks, and crush it in a big box with a tamper, then shovel it in on top of the fish.

Fisherman's C-op

“The San Remo Fisherman’s Co-operative was set up in 1948. That was an advantage to the fishermen because then we could make our own ice. Before that it used to come back on the truck from Dandenong. We then also had somewhere to store bait for the crays.

“With the amount of couta being sold the price fell in a heap. A cannery decided to take some. We loaded the couta into a tip truck and when they got it to the factory, they just tipped it out onto the floor! It was quite good after it was canned.

“For the last 12 months that I was in the couta industry we did a lot of filleting. We’d do about four boxes an hour. We’d put them in the co-op freezer and keep them until the winter. That helped the price a bit. Most of the couta were caught in the spring time – November being the best month – and a bit in the autumn.

“In the off-season I’d go catching pike at the back of Phillip Island or down to Cape Paterson, and in winter I’d go mash netting in Western Port. I made up all my own nets for whiting and rock flathead – mainly table fish.

“In the 1960s the couta started to decline so it was a case of get bigger or get out. A few of us got bigger boats, some just got out. The fleet went from about four big boats to about 15 in the cray and shark fishing industries.

Cray boat

“My first big boat was the 32 foot “Pamela J”. We worked mainly away fishing. My brother John – known as Jock – worked with me. Mostly around Phillip Island and Cape Paterson, and Cape Liptrap. We had “Pamela J” for about 4 to 5 years.

“The last two years we decided to Flinders Island for the opening of the cray season on November 1, which was about 24 hours’ steaming. We’d leave three or four days before, then we’d stay there until mid- December. We kept the crays alive in the boat’s wet well, then take them once a week into a little town on Flinders Island and from there they were air freighted out to Melbourne or Sydney.

“During the six weeks we were down there, my wife Judy would bring one of the kids down and we’d stay in a house there, while Jock flew out for a week. Because a cray boat is not very big and we’d get sick of each other!

“When we came home we crayed around home until February and we’d go to King Island for three weeks, though there was nowhere near the crays there as there was around Flinders Island.

“In the cray fishing industry the most important thing that happened in my time was the advent of echo-sounders, which allowed us to see what sort of bottom we‘d be putting the pots on and also how deep it was.

“GPS came in the ‘80s and meant we could go exactly back to where we wanted to be, which is especially important at sea where we can’t see land and can’t take any marks. We got radar in the early 1970s and that helped. We could travel at any time, day or night, foggy or clear.

Shark fishing

“We eventually got sick of going away for so long, so about the mid-‘60s I got a 45 foot boat called “Lentara”. On that we did a bit of craying but mostly shark. That way we’d only be at sea three to four days, in Bass Strait. That was with long-lines. They were 6 millimetre nylon rope with a hook clipped on about every 20 feet, and about 6 miles of line.

“It was pretty hard work. We’d start in daylight and finish just before dark. At the end of the day we had to clean the shark and we had an ice room on board, so we’d put them on ice. It got a bit hard for Jock so after 12 months he gave it away, and I put on two young deck hands.

“In 1971 I got another boat built by Pompies at Mordialloc. This was the “Endeavour”, 55 foot. That boat is still in San Remo and is probably the nicest boat that came into the port. Two Lacco brothers were working with Pompie at the time, so the “Endeavour” is a nice mix of both boat-building families.

“When I went to Pompies and said I wouldn’t mind a 55 footer they started building it and I gave them a five thousand dollar deposit. As they were building it I told them I wasn’t sure I could afford it, but they just kept on building. Eventually it was finished and launched and I said to them “Well, what do I owe you?” They said, “Well, what do you reckon?” So I wrote them a cheque for $50,000 and I still don’t know to this day if it was enough or too much or what!

“Both the “Lentana” and the “Endeavour” were huon pine on the bottom and above the water line was celery top pine. Worms won’t eat huon pine as it’s very oily.

“In those days they’d make us up a half model and we’d tell them what changes we wanted and they built it from the half model. Nowadays it’s all computer modelling.

“A few things happened with shark in the 1970s. Someone found out we could catch shark with monofilament nets. But the shark died in the nets because they can’t swim backwards, so they weren’t in as good a condition by the time they got home. We fought against nets, but Fisheries weren’t any help, saying the nets were more efficient. We didn’t win, so we had to join them and put nets on ourselves.

“Then the mercury scare came in and all the shark over 41 inches had to be thrown overboard, so it became political.

“About 1975 I got a 52 foot steel boat built, named “Jupana” – a combination of Judy, my wife, and Pam and Narelle, my two daughters.

“Now with quotas and restrictions they’re even having to put onboard cameras. This replacesd the observers we had to take out every now and then. It was to make sure we were not doing the wrong thing.

Trawling

In 1980 we got another wooden boat. Another chap and myself decided we were going to semi-retire, so we’d go trawling. My boat was called the “Mako” and my mate’s boat was the “Yukom”. They were identical.

We mainly caught school whiting and sand and tiger flathead. It was a pretty hard semi-retirement though, because the feeling that you want to keep going out is still there. But it was better, because it was mainly day fishing.

That carried me through until I retired in 2002.

I’ve done a couple of rescues. Going to Flinders Island one day in a 30 knot north west wind, I saw this flag out to sea and it turned out to be five Greeks in a runabout with no anchor, well off Kilcunda. If we hadn’t arrived they would never have been seen again. We brought them home.

Another day I got a call about 4am to say a freighter plane had gone down off Inverloch and could we go and find the pilot. We went down there, then the Tasmanian ferry and the Navy came later, so we got pushed further south. We found the wreckage, strewn everywhere. We then found one of the pilots drowned but still in his life jacket. An abalone boat pulled him out.

We found the other life jacket, but no pilot. After about 12 hours we decided to leave and had to get clearance from Canberra. After we’d been home a while we got a phone call from Canberra asking if we’d go back because they thought they’d seen an oil slick, but we’d had enough and told them to get the Navy to do it. Every time there was an emergency at sea out here they seemed to phone me.

I love the sea – the open air. There was never a day when I didn’t want to go to work – and there’s not too many who can say that.

Nowadays we could say that once upon a time I fished to live, but now I live to fish.