Covering 1,950 square kilometres, Port Phillip Bay is the entrance to Australia's busiest port and is one of Victoria's most popular recreational destinations. The city of Melbourne is situated just on the top of the bay.

Towards the south-west of the bay is the town of Queenscliff, famous for producing good catches of King George Whiting, Squid, Gummy Sharks and Big Flathead. My friends and I often fish off Queenscliff aboard Kyena Charters, skippered by Ivan.

This was to be Kenny's first trip fishing off Queenscliff. In fact, he had just recently been introduced to fishing and was fimly hooked on from then on. We arrived at the Queenscliff jetty at about 7am on a nice Spring morning. Ivan was already waiting for us on his boat and after loading up the passengers, we headed out to Port Phillip Bay to the reefs.

The reefs were home to more than a dozen species of fish, mostly the common BlueThroat Wrasse and Parrotfish which were in plague numbers. A bait that went down usually lasted only 5 minutes at most. Unfortunately, these fish were not popular among locals as the flesh is soft and flaky. Chinese seem to love these fish though, fetching a high price in the city restaurants. They are usually steamed with soy sauce, fresh from the fish tanks.

The boat stopped and we started drifting from the front of the reef. All lines went down and the bites started. Within minutes, each person were hauling in fishes all over. As expected, most of the catch were parrotfish and wrasse. Suddenly, Jon gave a yell and said he had a big one on his line. Pumping his rod frantically, he brought up a colourful Leatherjacket. Upon landing the fish, the trace snapped. The fish bit through the leader with its sharp teeth, much to the relief of Jon, on the boat.

This scene was repeated many times throughout the afternoon. Although the fishes landed that day were not brute fighters, they provided lots of thrills to newcomers and the girls (yep, we had some girls follow us on this trip) who wanted to try fishing for the very first time.

A nice BlueThroat Wrasse for the table

At the end of the afternoon, we landed a total of almost 80 over fishes in 5 hours. Not a bad effort for newbies to the sport of fishing. Of course, we did release the small ones and brought the biggies home for a good feed. The Leatherjacket were the best eating and easiest to skin as well. They actually tasted like chicken meat. And as usual...the question at the end of the day from the newbies is "When are we going again?"