2000fish's Blog – Steve Wozniak's hunt for fish species

DATELINE: APRIL 5, 2024 – EXMOUTH, AUSTRALIA

Note to the readership – I am not scared of most wildlife. I have faced brown snakes and wild elephants without permanently ruining my underwear. But put a small spider in front of me and I scream like one of those goats. David, who is a better and kinder person than I am but won’t pass up some honest fun, picked up on this in Perth when I started asking about huntsman spiders. Hunstman spiders are actually not deadly, but they are so big you will never convince me otherwise. Therefore, as is expected in the man code, David spent the rest of the trip trying to convince me that there was a spider in every corner I hadn’t checked. I would have done the same to him.

This is a Hunstman spider. Normal people don’t touch these.

So this was it. Exmouth – one of the most legendary and remote fishing destinations I would ever visit. It had been on my wish list for years, and on the morning of April 3, I was flying there. David sat a few rows away, which was probably a good thing, because I had an airport chili dog for breakfast. He would be spending the next five days in close proximity to me – it’s an exhausting proposition, but one for which Marta was extremely grateful. I think she sent him flowers.

We landed in the early afternoon, picked up a car, and, after I checked under the seat for spiders, we headed into town. These are tiny outposts set into the otherwise trackless scrub of Northwestern Australia. David had spent time up here camping as a kid – it’s something like a 20 hour drive from Perth. We found the bait store, picked up some assorted squid and shrimp, and, before checking in or eating, we drove to the harbor. The very moment I looked at the breakwall, a giant yellowmargin moray eased out of the rocks and swam along the jetty. It would have easily broken Luke Ovgard’s record, but I had no equipment ready. By the time I had rigged, he was gone, but there appeared to be plenty of other stuff swimming around, so we set to it.

I have to admit that I expected a new species on every cast, being that I had never fished the area before, but this is where the Fish Gods remind you who is in charge. The first fish I got was a Bengal sergeant, an old friend from Thailand. So was the second. And fourteenth. I could see a few other species, but the damsel was the dominant pest, and I needed to cast elsewhere. After about half an hour, I got a nice bite in the deeper water and pulled up some sort of unfamiliar seabreamy thing.

Dr. Jeff Johnson promptly identified it as a green-striped coral bream, and I was on the scoreboard.

The rest of the afternoon was pleasant – we fished both sides of the breakwater and got lots of blue tuskfish, but nothing else new to report.

The ubiquitous blue tuskfish. They get a LOT bigger than this.

David was very patient, but normal people need to eat and shower, so I reluctantly agreed to act civilized. We made a quick supermarket stop for beer and Red Bull.

It will not eat your baby, but it might eat your liver. (Speaking of dingos and babies, was there ever a worse dialect coach in Hollywood history?)

No one yet has been able to explain the purpose of this substance to me. And yet Men at Work made it famous.

The accommodations were pleasant – an Air B&B a few miles away, and David found, of all the places, a wonderful tapas place. (Exhale Restaurant.) Considering that there are maybe six eateries in the whole town, we were thrilled to get seated and even more thrilled to get excellent food. The next day would be a biggie – the first of four straight boat days.

Morning came early, especially as I was up half the night checking my bedroom for spiders. We drove to the harbor, and met Captain Peter of Aquatic Adventures Exmouth. The water looked decent – not flat, but very fishable, and the forecast looked to improve every day. We cruised out perhaps 40 minutes, and we finally set to the big event. Rigs that had flown 9000 miles were tied and ready.

Early in the morning, before anything has had a chance to go wrong.

A taciturn man with a long history fishing the local waters, Peter was still a bit perplexed by my species requests. Generally, the anglers who come all the way here want gamefish, and here I was talking about monocle breams and jobfish. We went to some deeper reefs – a couple of hundred feet – where Peter thought I could find a goldband jobfish. (An open world record.) It was here I discovered that there were a lot of sharks in Exmouth. 

My very first fish landed was an old friend – the brown-striped red snapper. I had the record on this species at one stage, caught during an especially awkward weekend in Thailand.

On both bait and jigs, I repeatedly hooked up what felt like jobfish, and then, a few cranks later, I would get destroyed by a shark. I brought up several jobfish heads, but these don’t count as a species. I finally had to resort to the desperation of dropping a hookless jig to get the jobfish chasing it into the midwater, and then dropping my heaviest setup – an 80 pound class monster of a meat stick – and simply horsing the fish out of the water at high speed. Even then, I barely got it onboard ahead of a big shark.

The goldband jobfish – a new species, and my first world record of the Exmouth trip, but it had taken much of the day.

We did get some other assorted critters and there was certainly constant action, but I had pictured the place as a slam-dunk species every few casts, and I was a bit downtrodden. This is how the Fish Gods reward hubris.

David scored a nice cobia. Just to be confusing, the Australians call these “Lemonfish.”

The tiger shark that chased my jobfish decided to hang around the boat, which, although preferable to a Huntsman spider, was still fairly intimidating.

This picture does it no justice, but the thing was at least 12 feet long. If you look carefully behind the first dorsal, there’s still a whole of fish behind it. I’ll never put on a life jacket again.

Luckily, David knew the solution – food and drink, mostly drink. We found the other great restaurant in town, oddly enough, a Pizza/Mexican place with live music, Frothcraft Brewery. Among the songs played was The Angels’ “Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again,” another of the unofficial Australian national anthems. For some reason, when this song is performed live, the audience feels compelled to add a series of completely obscene extra lyrics. Americans do the same thing with a particular Jimmy Buffet song, so I wasn’t completely shocked. 

Then David claimed to see a spider in the bathroom and ruined everything. I checked under the lid of every commode I visited for the whole week.

The next day, we boarded with Peter and hit some shallower reefs. There were fewer sharks, and they had less time to grab the fish, so we got into all kinds of species very quickly. (By the way, in case I had not noted this previously – David in no way cares about the species stuff. He wanted to catch real fish, and frequently mocked me for using sabikis.) 

The first new species was a Northwest Australian whiptail, adding to my extensive whiptail collection. 

Species three for Exmouth.

Shortly after the whiptail, I brought up what I assumed was an oddly-colored spangled emperor, but, according to Dr. Johnson, it was actually a Northwestern Australian emperor, a recently-described species that has yet to be formally named. So it goes on the mystery list, but will be counted as soon as the papers are published.

A species in waiting.

After a few more assorted emperors, I decided to try a small metal jig, and caught a chunky longfin grouper. (A species I previously had from the Great Barrier Reef.) This one was two pounds, easily beating the existing world record. How, you may ask, did I know this? Because I looked at all the Western Australian fish from the Fishes of Australia website, determined if I had the species, then looked at the existing world record or minimums for any open records, then set up a reference notebook. You might also ask if I have anything better to do, and the answer is – no I do not.

Record two for Exmouth. David just can’t stop himself.

Next up was a gorgeous species – the double whiptail, which is what I like to call a “Samurai Fish” – a new species and record at the same time.

Species two of the day, and record 235. Note the incredibly long tail filaments.

A smaller but even more colorful example.

A little while later, on a smaller rig, I pulled up a double-lined fusilier.

Species three of the day and 2266 lifetime.

The hits kept on coming, and in the meantime, David, who was not bothering with the small hook silliness, was catching some nice fish on his own. One of the best was a coral trout, which is actually a grouper, and is sort of a rite of passage for Australian saltwater anglers. Coral trout fight incredibly hard, are gorgeous, and are one of the best fish to eat anywhere on earth.

Well done, David.

The triumphant anglers. This is a milestone fish for any fisherman, and that’s the most genuine look of joy on his face I would see until I got on the flight home.

I then pulled up a very strange-looking monocle bream. It took some research with Dr. Jeff Johnson, but it turned out to be a rainbow monocle bream, a newer species endemic to the area, and another Samurai fish.

Species four and record three of the day. Now things were shaping up.

This had to be the coolest-looking fish of the trip so far.

Somewhere in there, I pulled up a random bluespotted tuskfish, which made five species on the day, and then, on a metal jig, I got number six – a frostback grouper.

Adding to my tuskfish collection.

I didn’t saw it was a big grouper.

That’s us with Captain Peter and Jay, the owner of Aquatic Adventures Exmouth. David is still smiling from the coral trout.

Now that felt like what I expected. I was thrilled, and celebrated with at least a beer and a half. Note to the uninitiated – NEVER try to outdrink an Australian. It can only end in three places – jail, the ER, or a gutter on George Street. Every town in Australia has a George Street, and every George Street has a gutter containing a barely-conscious American who tried to keep up with the Australians.

The scoreboard was starting to look very solid, and we had two more days to go. I still had very high hopes for some of my main long-term obsessive fish for this area, especially the longtail tuna, which is like a spearfish except it’s a tuna.

That evening, David made a spider-shaped cutout from one of the beer boxes and put it in the sun visor in the car. I opened the visor, and the thing fell into my lap. I would like to claim that I reacted calmly, but unfortunately, David was there to witness my screams, which went on for quite some time. Despite a liberal dose of Benadryl and Dingo lager, I still didn’t sleep well.

Steve