Mark the mulloway man
My initial contact with Mark Shean, then living at Balnarring, was in 1989, but it wasn’t about mulloway. He’d caught a good many snapper from Western Port including the recent capture of one that weighed 13.5 kg or thereabouts, and asked if he would send me a photo of it.
Mark eventually turned the conversation around to mulloway and inquired about the best approach, which prompted me to ask where he wanted to try.
“The Barwon of course.” He said, “Where you catch them.”
I replied that it would be a long way to come: I didn’t know how far at the time, but later found it was a 177 km or 354 km for the round trip, but he was adamant.
“Just answer couple of questions for me,” he asked.
Knowing of my preferred approach at the time, he asked whether he would have to slow-troll a live bait, to which I replied that most anglers fished at anchor, some using squid for bait, preferably as soon as possible after being caught.
“Oh boy,” he said, “I’d be the best squid fisherman on the Mornington peninsula!”
We discussed preferred times to fish and so forth, but I didn’t expect to hear anything else from him. And indeed, it was from a mutual friend that I heard that Mark had caught a fair-sized mulloway. That, to the best of my recollection, would have been in April of 1989.
Well, good for him I thought, he’s got one and I daresay he’d be pleased with that, but when several weeks had passed, I was again told the same thing from another source. I replied that I already knew, which drew the unexpected response that he’d caught this one just a couple of nights ago.
Naturally, I rang to congratulate Mark on his catch, to which he replied that he’d actually caught three: 37 lb, 46 lb and 58 lb, were – as I recall – the weights quoted.
Well, I knew something interesting was going on and suggested that maybe I could go out with him, not to fish, but to possibly get a picture or two. But he wasn’t keen on that, expressing his preference for fishing alone.
OK, fine by me, but I hoped that might change.
Well, eventually it did, but not until 1992 when I’d submitted my manuscript and photos for the third edition of my Sportfish publication “Fishing Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula.”
I’d submitted any number of snapper photos for the cover, but the publisher, Jeff Lawes, wanted a recent photo of a mulloway for whatever reason.
An opportunity soon arose when young Michael Stonehouse expressed a desire for me to take him mulloway fishing. And on a rowing trip in the dinghy, he caught a mulloway of 11.5 kg.
But Michael, although quite a presentable lad, failed to smile on command, and – using a film camera in the dark – I had no way of knowing that his expression, on that occasion, gave a good impersonation of the Sphinx.
I approached Mark once more, flannelled him a bit saying that I needed a photo of a good-looking guy with a mulloway for the cover of my book, and that was the start of, I think eleven trips I did with him, and in May 1992 I got that picture of Mark with a 23.5 kg mulloway.
I got more than a cover picture for my book though, and apart from a good many photos I took of him with large mulloway, sometimes several – and as many as four on one trip on September 4, 1994 – that reinforced the efficacy of baiting up with those freshly caught squid with the bite-triggering pheromones still being exuded.
As it turned out, Mark eventually caught twenty mulloway from the Barwon with an average weight of possibly 20 kg, the largest, a magnificent fish of 32 kg.
That mulloway fishery lasted until around 2000, and in 1997 there were many large mulloway caught, but that’s another story. Since then, I’ve had reports of, and photographed several medium size mulloway from the Barwon, but reports of those bigger fish have been few and far between. Hopefully that will change.