After a day spent primarily in packing, shuffling, unpacking because Mirinda wanted to take the bathroom sink and I hadn’t allowed for it, repacking, squeezing, sitting on suitcases and trying to finish off the beer excess at Dural, we set off for the airport to catch our plane to Haneda.
For want of anything else to report, I thought I’d relate a story Bob told us today.
Years ago he was at some bloke’s house and noticed a very big fish on the wall. When questioned the chap said it was a coral trout and that he’d caught it. He then said “There’s a funny story about that fish!”
For the uninitiated, the coral trout is so called because it eats coral. Coral is poisonous and the coral trout retains the poison in it’s system. It’s never enough to be a danger and, according to Bob, next to Barramundi, coral trout is one of the best tasting fish in the world.
Anyway, this guy told the story of how he caught the coral trout. He was fishing off a boat in a bit of a swell and, when he felt something take hold of the bait, he let the waves haul the creature up after which he’d furiously wind the line in on the subsequent downward move. Eventually he hauled it into the boat.
It was a MASSIVE coral trout. The biggest the boat captain had ever seen. He reckoned it would have to be at least a hundred years old. He told the fisherman something but the fisherman was so caught up in the wondrous fish, he didn’t really hear him.
He had to catch a plane home so he organised to have the fish frozen and shipped in the hold (who knew you could do that?) and then delivered to his house where he put it in a big chest freezer he had. He licked his lips as he told his wife how good coral trout was to eat.
The phone rang. It was a fisheries officer looking for the fisherman. He asked him all sorts of questions like if he’d caught the big coral trout and if he’d taken it home. On hearing about the fish, the fisheries officer told the fisherman not to eat the fish. He stressed that he shouldn’t eat the fish. In fact he told him to take it and have a cast made of it to hang on the wall then throw the fish away.
When the fisherman asked why, he was told that while a young trout might have small and essentially harmless quantities of poison in its system, a 100 year old coral trout was basically lethal and would probably have killed anyone eating it in a very short space of time.
It was a close call!
As opposed to ours at the airport which had us on the plane and in our seats with plenty of time to spare.
We took off and somewhere across the outback, the clocks changed to tomorrow. And the beginning of our Japanese adventure…
Wow what a story saved in the nick of time or should I say fish of time.
Love mum xxxx