Spearfishing the Great Barrier Reef: not for the faint-hearted
Fish hunter Anthony Vaughan descends to the sea floor, then waits for them to come to him...
Anthony Vaughan’s preferred technique for hunting fish with a speargun sounds a little counter-intuitive. Instead of chasing them, or trying to sneak up on them, he’ll descend 20m or so to the sea floor then remain stock still for as long as his breath-hold allows – typically a minute or two – and wait for them to come to him. “Big fish tend to be curious,” he explains. “They’ll approach for a closer look. So you’re just waiting, waiting, until something good comes within range, then bam, you take your best shot.” On this dive, though, something odd happened: instead of just one or two potential targets, an entire school of trevally appeared and proceeded to whirl around him like a silvery tornado. Being in the eye of the storm was “awesome but it almost made me dizzy,” he says. His dive buddy took this shot and coined an apt name for it: Fishnado.
Vaughan, 22, lives in Yeppoon, a little coastal town near Rockhampton, and works as a skipper on the ferry service out to Great Keppel Island. (Once there, his nautical street-cred dials down a notch as he helms a glass-bottomed boat full of tourists around the reefs.) It’s a lifestyle that affords him plenty of opportunities to indulge his passions for diving and spearing; delicious fish such as coral trout and mangrove jack abound in these waters, and he serves them up at Sunday lunches with his parents and four brothers. That is, if he hasn’t been mugged by a bull shark or bronze whaler; they’ve learnt to recognise the sound of his gun going off and routinely try to steal his catch.
The dive spot pictured is so productive that Vaughan is reluctant to disclose its details, other than to say it’s a bommie that rises out of deep water somewhere north of Yeppoon. Now, you’d think that being surrounded by hundreds of fat trevally, the biggest nudging 70cm, was an opportunity to fill his boots. He couldn’t miss, surely? Actually, he didn’t even take a shot: although beautiful to look at, these aren’t a great eating fish. “Better for admiring than for shooting,” he laughs.