I really wanted sashimi.
Me, Miyoung, Sharon, Edang — all of us wanted it badly.
Sashimi from Japanese restaurants here isn’t live-fish sashimi, so it’s always just a little short of scratching that itch.
Alright, if there’s none around, let’s just catch our own. We went to Anaconda and each bought a fishing rod, plus bait.
Time just crawled by and there wasn’t a bite in sight. Next time, and the time after that, and the time after that — still nothing.
We went camping and a friend brought a little inflatable dinghy. We rowed a few hundred meters out and the fish actually started biting.
Ah, so that’s it, you’ve got to get further out. So I bought a boat too. Turned out that had just been luck though — nothing was biting for me.
I did some research. Apparently you need to know the tide times, know exactly where the fish show up, put real effort into your bait, and upgrade your gear.
So I poked around fishing communities online, and it was all like, meet up somewhere at 3am, be at some spot in Newcastle by 5am — that kind of thing.
I didn’t have that kind of passion for a plate of sashimi. I just wanted to eat it — I had no interest in dragging myself out there at that hour.
On another camping trip, a bunch of little kids were swarming the jetty at Lake Macquarie.
“What are you guys doing?”
“There’s an octopus!”
“Where, where?”
“Right down there.”
One of the boys had a hand spear and even knew how to use it, but they were all hesitating because they had no idea what to do once they’d actually caught it.
“Hang on a sec, guys, I’ll go grab a container with a lid.”
The container was ready.
“I’ll handle the cleanup, you just focus on catching it.”
The kid fired the spear. It landed a solid hit — I could practically feel it myself — and the spear handle shuddered in his grip. He had no idea what to do next, so I hauled it up myself. The spear tip was barbed so it wouldn’t pull back out, which gave me some trouble, but I wrenched it free, dropped it in the container, and slammed the lid shut.
Phew — the kids clearly had never seen a live octopus before. Half curious, half scared, they were staring at the whole scene like it was something completely alien.
“So what are you guys going to do with this?”
“We don’t know.”
“I’ll cook it up — want to come eat it together?”
“Yeah, yeah!”
The kids, not really knowing what they were getting into, just followed me out of pure curiosity.
I stunned the octopus first, cleaned it, and scrubbed it hard with salt to work out as much of the slime as I could. I filled the biggest pot I’d brought camping with water, brought it to a boil, and lowered the legs in first. A little while later, one of the kids’ dads showed up at our campsite.
I told him we’d caught an octopus and I was cooking it up, and he seemed quietly thrilled about it.
I could tell he was supposed to be watching the kids himself, and now that their attention was locked on me, he was itching to go somewhere and knock back a few beers instead.
The octopus cooked up nicely, and I cut each kid a piece of leg. Isn’t this what real hands-on learning looks like? Hahaha.
Not one of them liked it. Of course they didn’t — this, kids, is the taste of adulthood.
That’s when it hit me — this is it! A spear! I could use a spear instead of a rod. That way I’d actually be catching what I could see.
Edang and I planned a trip to Balmoral Beach. Before heading there I stopped by a spearfishing shop and bought a $20 yellow hand spear. The rocky area on the left side of Balmoral is a permitted fishing zone.
I started scouting the water. Oh — Sydney’s ocean is a bit rough, but not bad at all, fish were popping into view here and there, and something called turban snails, kind of like conch, were absolutely everywhere.
I dove down, maybe 5-6 meters. Tucked in a rocky corner, a stonefish was sitting dead still, pretending it wasn’t even there. Shoop! Thwack — clean hit. On the way back up I was picking up a few decent-sized turban snails when something moved in a gap between the rocks, and looking closer, it was an octopus.
I wrestled with it for a good while but couldn’t land it, and my body had gotten too cold, so I told myself I’d get out, warm up, and come back. After about thirty minutes baking in the sun and getting back in, I couldn’t find that same spot again.
For a while I got sucked into the world of freediving.
I practiced breathing techniques and studied how to hold my breath longer. I downloaded an app and followed its program for a week, and my times started climbing fast.
From a max of 45 seconds, I went to 1:30, then 2:00, then 2:30, and eventually well past 4 minutes.
Brimming with confidence, I bought a wetsuit, added some weights, and headed to Kurnell. The water wasn’t calm, but there were quite a few other divers around.
Alright, just like I’d practiced — breathe-up, final breath, and down I went. The water wasn’t bad. Around 7-8 meters down, it suddenly went ice-cold and my body just sank straight down.
I got scared. Getting scared made me want to surface. Wanting to surface made it impossible to hold my breath. I didn’t even last a minute.
Same thing happened the second time. Once I lost my composure, all that static-apnea practice turned out to be completely useless.
Some time later, back at Balmoral. I’d decided the hand spear was too clunky underwater, so I bought a short air-compressed speargun I could clip to my waist. I was scouting near the surface when thousands of baitfish rocketed past just 1-2 meters below me. Before I could even go “whoa,” twenty or thirty kingfish came racing right after them. I figured it was just a nice show to watch, but then the school of kingfish I thought had already passed suddenly circled back around me and started swimming in loops. No idea what behavior pattern that was, but for me it was a hunting opportunity. I went to aim the gun, but there were so many of them it felt like I could hit something firing at random.
I fired at random. A dull jolt hit the fish’s body and traveled right back to me. No idea which one I’d hit, but I’d definitely hit something. The kingfish school vanished in an instant, and one that looked to be about a meter long was just floating there motionless, stunned, bobbing. Whoa! What is even happening right now — this is the kind of thing pro spearfishers rent boats, go way out, and risk sharks for, and here I was pulling it off right off the shore, pure luck I guess. Getting closer, I saw the spear hadn’t gone all the way through — it was only halfway lodged somewhere between the head and back — and on a hunch I grabbed it and pressed down hard, which woke the fish right back up. I was so startled I ended up wrapping both arms around it. Now awake, it thrashed side to side with everything it had, and I pulled it in toward my body with everything I had. In a flash it landed seven or eight hits on my stomach, legs, face, and neck before slipping free of my arms. The spear came out with it too. If I hadn’t been wearing a wetsuit, its fins would have torn my body to shreds.
Little Bay. Past the shallow rocky area, about 200-300 meters out, the water goes calm and a sheer cliff face appears, dropping a good 30-40 meters straight down. The whole scenery changed in an instant — a dark, quiet ocean. As I moved up and down along the rock face, staying within about 10 meters, I locked eyes with two decent-sized rockfish tucked in a crevice. They didn’t even bother fleeing. I aimed the gun and fired! Pfft — the gun must not have had enough air in it, because the spear just drifted limply and dropped right in front of me. “Oh, come on, seriously?” I muttered, deflated, while the two fish just stared right back at me like they were mocking me — what exactly are you even doing?
Whatever, I was tired anyway, so I surfaced, and since there was a rock shelf right there I climbed up onto it to rest for a bit. While I was doing that, a wave suddenly slammed in and knocked me flat, dragging me 4-5 meters in across the rock shelf. Right as I was thinking I should stand up and walk toward the beach, the next wave hit. I should have made a quick call, but I froze up for a second in a mini-panic, and ended up getting rolled this way and that across the rock shelf by the waves for a good while. Every time I saw a chance to swim, the water would drain out from under me before I could; every time I tried to stand, my fins would catch and I couldn’t get up; every time I reached down to pull the fins off, the next wave would roll me over again. If anyone had been watching from above, they must have gotten a good laugh out of it.