There’s probably more important things than spending the weekend chilling with your kids, after they’ve grown up and left home – but I can’t think of too many.
Despite the time apart over the last few years, my adult son Steve and I still share a few interests, including a love of fishing and camping. We’re both primitives at our core, I suppose, and there’s few things we like better than catching a fish or two together and cooking it that night over a camp fire of Aussie blue gum.
We don’t talk about the economy, or when is he going to get a real job,or how to
remedy the political ills of the world … none of these things are of interest to a Gen Y kid. Frankly I get bored talking about them too, especially when I have to write about them for a living. We just talk about the fishing and why he caught more than me yet again, while I try to explain that I still think fly fishing is better fun. If it’s harder it’s got to be better fun, hasn’t it?
At least now we can knock back a few nice reds together and the whiff of eucalyptus smoke from the camp fire is as good as a cohiba esplindidos. That’s what I told him anyway.
The organiser of our last trip was former Brisbane teacher Steve Wilkes. I met Steve a while ago at a day’s fishing I’d organised with son Steve at Hinze Dam in South East Queensland and Steve told me about the weekend camping trips he was organising at Camp Lake Fire, a bush retreat above the southern shores of Lake Maroon, about 90 minutes from Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Steve organises father and son weekends, father and daughter weekends and mother and son weekends.
He’s even organised mothers and daughters’ weekends, which proves his dedication to the concept of bringing parents and kids together. Apparently, the kids accept that the parents are needed to drive the car to get there, and the parents are happy just being on a boat alone with their son or daughter, because the only electronic gadgets are in the electric outboards and the little buggers can’t escape your company – so you’re stuck talking to each other.
We decided to give it a go and I managed to organise a date with son Steve – I found ringing his mother works a lot better than than trying the various mobile phone numbers that he’s been through since you last spoke – and we gave it a go.
Accommodation at Camp Lake Fire is a combination of cabins which overlook the water and unpowered campsites. A fully equipped kitchen and dining hall/conference area is also available. Pretty neat, really. Plenty of room to lay out the gear on the kitchen tables.
Steve put us up at the conference area after a night getting quietly sozzled in front of the camp fire. It was comfortable and warm and we headed to the lake straight after breakfast, with a civilised take away cappuccino prepared at the shop next door by our host.
Steve also provided us with live shrimp bait and fully rigged rods and reals – all the latest gear, He had some excellent fly fishing rods and reels which I tried out for him: all good.
We started out on the lake with Steve’s latest addition: a “Caninghi” – a combination of canoe and dinghy. It’s made in Brisbane by Rosco Canoes and is billed as “the worlds first stand up canoe, set to change the very essence of fishing from a paddle craft. With comfort,stability and functionality like never before.”
That’s a pretty fancy description, but actually it looked more like a fat blue duck, pointed at both ends, but it was an amazing little piece of ingenuity. Weighing only 30kg, its made from vacuum resin infusion with a foam core. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds very impressive.
The bit I liked most was the slide-in wheels. You drive up, unload the Caninghi, put the wheels in, load up everything (motor, batteries, esky, bait, the rods) and wheel it down to the water. Then, keep pushing, jump in and motor/paddle off a little, reach over the side, remove the wheels (they float) and store them inside, presuming you don’t let them float off too far, before you work out how to operate the motor. I’d rather not discuss this last part in more detail.
On returning you reverse the procedure.
Another nice idea is the gated lean bar. This gives you support while casting, or even throwing a casting net from a standing position. Which is pretty neat for a mono hull, really. And the seats really are smart. They’re light, reversible and simply slide along the gunwale.
To summarise the day’s fishing concisely, Steve caught about 20 fish with live bait and I caught one on the fly after about four hours, but only because I tied on a sinker and put a live shrimp onto the end of a shrimp fly.
I sucked.
I really sucked.
But I was reminded, yet again, that the best way to bond with your son on a fishing trip is to catch less fish than he does. And, well, I was really, really good at that.I got a lot less.
He was happy. I was happy. It was more than enough.
Make the time. Give it a go.
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