No single fisherman had more impact on the evolution of beach and rock fishing on the far north coast of NSW though the 1960s than Len Thompson. His introduction to the area of the use of garfish for tailor bait in the early 1950s alone triggered change in recreational fishing of the scale of an industrial revolution.
Len told Dad that he first got the idea of garfish and three-hook rigs from fishermen who fished for tailor in Sydney Harbour. He modified what he had been shown by abandoning the use of a wire trace and adding a fourth 4/0 hook to the rig. He then perfected the use of garfish without a sinker for beach and rock fishing for tailor.
His use of white pilchards to catch flathead on ocean beaches was of similar pioneering significance, but it never developed into the game-changer that fishing for tailor with garfish, and later pilchards, did.
My father was a good friend of Len and I had listened to the pair discuss fishing on numerous occasions before I actually saw Len fish. I was spellbound by Len’s stories of catching all of the species that were the focus of my fantasies. For example, his disclosure to Dad that the one place within reasonable driving distance from Tweed Heads, where Len lived, where you could regularly catch serious quantities of big bream was near Rat Island at Jumpinpin (just north of Southport). When he reported the magnitude of some of his catches, it created in my mind an almost religious reverence for the place. I particularly remember him recounting the story of the night he fished from his boat to catch over 200 bream that averaged over a pound and a half. ‘They were so thick, Jack, that on one occasion I went to make a short cast and as I was swinging my rod around my bait just touched the water behind me on the other side of the boat. My cast was abruptly stopped because there was a bream on my hook.’ Len made extremely large catches of bream at Jumpinpin a regular occurrence. It is well recorded that he caught 290 bream there in one all-night fishing competition.
For years I pondered how thick the bream must have been. Then one night about ten years later I was fishing the point of the rocks at the northern tip of Cabarita (Bogangar) headland. It was a calm night in early September in, I think, 1968. I was standing on my favourite rock in about 8 inches of water. The bream were truly on the bite and I had caught about sixty. My normal cast was only about 20 feet and bites were immediate. I had just put a yabbie on my hook when it slipped from my grasp. It landed between my feet. I immediately wound up my line so I could make a cast. My line was unexpectedly tight; there was a bream of about 2 pounds on it.
Len’s stories about Jumpinpin were to change dramatically in the ten years or so he and I discussed fishing. He recounted with great lament how the average size of the bream from the area declined alarmingly. Two-pound fish, or even larger, made up a big part of catches in the very early years of his fishing there, which I worked out had to be the late 1940s, but the incidence of large fish declined quickly. By the mid-1960s the expression ‘Jumpinpin bream’ was used disparagingly, around the Tweed at least, to describe bream that were of just legal size; there were lots of them, but they were not worth fishing for!
It was Len’s versatility as a fisherman that had biggest impact on my opinion of his standing. I knew he had won many recreational fishing titles, including national ones, and lots of other competitions. One afternoon he showed Dad and me a photo of two cane laundry baskets full of whiting that he caught a few nights before in the Clarence River on yabbies he had taken from the Tweed (Len found yabbies too hard to get in the Clarence). There were over a hundred fish in the two baskets and they weighed slightly more than 100 pounds. I was about twelve at the time and while I found the photo and description of the catch almost incredible, Len’s tale of what happened the next night when he returned to repeat the feat was far more exciting. He had only caught five or six whiting when a school of jewfish moved in. ‘The buggers took every whiting I hooked.’ I was in absolute rapture when he described how he had no option but to change to his heavier gear and catch a few jewies in the hope that this would discourage them sufficiently for him to be able to get back to his whiting fishing. He caught four: ‘They weren’t big ones. About 23 pounds.’ I simply could not understand why anybody would want to catch whiting, no matter how big, when you could be catching jewies! And 23-pounders at that!
Len’s tales of his early tailor fishing trips to Fraser Island also made for fantastic listening. It was pioneering stuff. It is well documented in the fishing magazine literature. Len was the only fisherman at the time who had an almost unlimited supply of garfish. He was very good friends with Frank Dunn, who owned the bait shop at the mouth of the Tweed River and who fished with the Boyd brothers, the Tweed’s only truly full-time beach-hauling crew. Len was their best customer for garfish. Between them they provided him with all the garfish he needed to keep his dedicated bait freezer full.
There was no regular barge to Fraser Island in those days, so Len and his mates had to charter one from one of the sand-mining companies. I think it was the second year they went that the tailor were so plentiful and so undisturbed that they merely drove along the beach spotting black schools of fish. They would stop and catch one or two out of each school and only stay if the fish were over at least 3 pounds. Six- and 7-pound tailor were common there at that time.
For all of Len’s innovation and skills, he was not the ‘prettiest’ fisherman. His casting technique was, putting it kindly, very ordinary. It was written up by one journalist as being specially developed for effectiveness when standing waist deep in water, which Len frequently did when fishing with garfish and no sinker. But I saw Len fish too often to take this description as anything other than a refusal to acknowledge the ‘feet of clay’ of the outstanding fisherman of his era. In any case it never stopped him casting far enough for the type of fishing he enjoyed.
The first time I saw Len fish was before I had met him, but I knew of his legend. Dad and I were standing on the grassy headland at Hastings Point watching three guys catching tailor off the famous Flat Top. Two were catching a tailor virtually every throw with garfish and no sinker. Even with my inexperienced eye I could see that one was doing it much more neatly and efficiently than the other. You could easily form the opinion that one was a much better fisherman then the other. I clearly remember dad saying, ‘That’s Len Thompson.’ The one I automatically assumed was the legend was in fact Ron Bailey. Ron was an outstanding tailor fisherman himself. And he did fish extremely efficiently. The other fisherman that morning was not in Len and Ron’s group. He was spinning, and only catching an occasional fish.
We watched enthralled for about another quarter of an hour until the tailor went off the bite. As Len and Ron were coming back to their vehicle, Dad took me down to have a chat with them. Len was quite obviously not happy, even though he was carrying about twenty tailor of about 3 pounds each, the typical size of fish from Flat Top. After the acknowledgement of recognition, Dad made a comment to the effect ‘they were biting pretty well there for a while’. Without hesitation, Len was on the case of what I was to begin to realise was his pet hate, and he approached it in ‘colourful’ language, for which he was noted: ‘Those bastards with their spinners have stuffed this place. As they do everywhere they go.’
Len then told us that when he first started to fish Flat Top with garfish, tailor lived there. He could catch them at any time of the day and often fish until he ran out of bait. ‘Now you get a few fish right on daybreak but as soon as the sun comes up the bloody spinners start to plop all over the place and the tailor piss off.’ In response to Dad’s question of what it was about spinning that chased the fish, he was adamant: ‘The way those heavy metal things slam into the water frightens the hell out of them. They are like gunshots into the water. Then they get pulled through the water as fast as possible. There is no way tailor will hang around with all that going on.’ Len repeated these sentiments to me numerous times in the years that followed. He hated the fact that people were allowed to spin. He was absolutely convinced of its evils, and he was the expert witness.
I accepted this logic for years. Len was, after all, the guru. He was a pioneer and a logical but original thinker. He was an engineer and a successful businessman. Once I had accumulated sufficient experience and evidence on both spinning and bait fishing for tailor I was able to conduct my own analyses.
I could confirm that spinning did indeed put schools of tailor off the bite and chase them away. I had witnessed such events many times. I had done it myself more times than I would like to admit. But my analyses of why the tailor fled from areas where spinning was occurring led to different conclusions from the ones Len adhered to. My assessment of the primary reason spinning put tailor off the bite was because it got the school excited and initiated a feeding response, even a frenzy, but there was no feed. They would charge around excitedly chasing things that appeared to be food until they collectively realised there was nothing to eat, so nothing really to be excited about. It was an unnatural outcome. So they left the area. With bait fishing there were lots of bits and pieces of garfish or pilchards that their mates spat out when hooked. There was reason to stay excited.
A major component of my evidence for this definitive conclusion was that if tailor were already feeding on natural food when the spinning started they would keep feeding and taking spinners. My observations suggested this was particularly the case if they were feeding on white pilchards, small fish on which they could feed for some time without being satiated. I particularly remember one day when several of us were spinning off Flat Top. It was in the middle of a day when tailor had a school of white pilchards herded up against the rocks. They were repeatedly picking the stragglers off the back edge of the school. Using a small chrome spinner I caught a tailor almost every throw for over two hours. They were still feeding and biting when I left, by which time there were about a dozen guys throwing spinners at them and all catching at least some.
Then there was Len’s pioneering of fishing for dusky flathead on ocean beaches. Through to the middle of the 1950s dusky flathead were considered a species for which a really good catch for most fishermen was two or three. But flathead would invariably be the biggest fish in mixed catches from rivers and estuaries. In estuarine fishing competitions it was unusual for the prize for the biggest fish not to go to the catcher of a flathead. On ocean beaches a catch of more than one flathead was considered most unusual, probably a fluke.
Smaller flathead were mainly caught with prawns, while live ‘poddy mullet’ were the bait of choice for bigger ones. Large quantities of relatively small flathead were caught by ‘yo-yoing’ with prawns in the deep holes in rivers and bays. Joubert’s Hole in the Tweed River was the most famous spot in the Tweed Shire, as far back as the 1940s at least.
Flathead fishing was to change dramatically with the advent of white pilchards as bait. I do not know what Len Thompson’s role was in the introduction of pilchards into flathead fishing, but I do know that he was almost certainly the first in the Tweed Shire to make an art form of it. And he was, predictably, a lot better at it than others of his era.
Up until about 1958 my father frequently advised me that white pilchards were of very little value as bait. Popular opinion was that they were too soft. Of course, froggies were even softer, and therefore, more useless, particularly for bream fishing. Only flathead liked them anyway. As the method of the day for flathead fishing was to cast out and leave the bait where it landed it was of little surprise that not many flathead were caught on pilchards. The one recognised exception was to use multiple pillies hooked through the eye until the hook was loaded and then floated under a ‘bobby cork’. This technique was very successful when walking the banks of rivers or creeks following the drifting cork. Frank Dunn created a reputation for himself in the late 1950s for catching relatively big numbers of very large flathead using this method around the Cotton Trees, near the mouth of the Tweed River.
But Len was not one to be constrained by tradition or accepted prejudices. He also had at least three major additional factors on his side. First, he had a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a US military issue left-hand-drive Willys Jeep. Second, he had a very large deep freeze dedicated to bait (virtually exclusively garfish and white pillies). And third, he had, through Frank Dunn and the Boyd brothers, access to the freshest of bait; these commercial fishermen would contact Len whenever they made a decent haul. The significance of these three attributes in combination is worth some elaboration.
When I first began to regularly fish the Kingscliff area in 1958, if I caught a glimpse of a car-size vehicle on the beach, no matter how far away, I knew it was Len Thompson’s. The only other vehicles on the beaches in the good old days were the occasional truck from the sand-mining companies. As there were very few access points, even for walking access, other than both ends of most beaches, Len effectively had the beaches to himself. This was true for virtually all beaches, at least from Tweed Heads to Iluka at the mouth of the Clarence River.
And people did not fish for flathead on ocean beaches in those days. Once south of Ballina if you saw a fisherman on the beach he would most likely be using a handline with a pipi for bait. There was virtually no chance of seeing somebody fishing for flathead correctly, other than Len. A couple of years later local banana growers, first Harry Pearce, and then tomato growers from Cudgen, began to buy short wheel-based Land Rovers and progressively use them for beach fishing. At that time Len still had most of the beaches from Hastings Point south to himself (there was no bridge over the Pottsville Creek at that time so access to Len’s favourite local beach for daytime tailor fishing, Mooball Beach or Wooyung, was not straightforward). Len’s sole access to these areas slowly changed as the Cudgen farmers, led by Keith Pritchard, Jimmy Kelleher, Arthur Holt and Ian Philp, began using their Land Rovers to fish the beaches. A few years later, about 1960 I think, Artie Riesenweber was the first in the area to turn up on the beach in a Toyota.
An interesting aside is that the numerous photos I saw of Len with his friends and very big catches of tailor from Wooyung always included more than a handful of bream that had been caught while fishing for tailor with garfish. What was of most interest was that these bream were almost always bigger than the tailor. Dad and I would later confirm that the Mooball Beach/Wooyung area was indeed a terrific place for small tailor and big bream, together in the same holes. Our evidence was compelling, even though we fished for them mostly with white pillies, or froggies.
When Len went flathead fishing he manipulated his schedule to take advantage of being one of very few fishermen on many of the beaches, often the only one. In the early days at least, he would certainly be the only truly mobile one. Very occasionally he would encounter somebody like myself or Noel Wylie on a pushbike, but that was seldom more than a mile or two from Kingscliff. In peak flathead season in autumn he would occasionally go several days in a row, but never to the same beach. On one occasion I was talking to him after he had just returned from fishing, on the south Ballina beach. He had a big number (more than twenty) of very good size flathead, mainly around 3 to 4 pounds, for which this beach was famous. He offered to take me back there, but he insisted that there was absolutely no way he would go back for at least two weeks. He was certain that he had caught virtually every flathead in each of the flathead holes on the beach. He was adamant that it took at least two weeks for a beach to restock after he ‘did it over’. If you had a dozen or so beaches to yourself, as he did, you did not have to go back to the same one for two weeks anyway. And you could be sure it would be good as nobody else would have fished it for flathead in the interim, certainly not as Len did.
My subsequent experience was that Len’s theory on localised depletion was seriously pessimistic. There was no doubt he was an exceptionally good fisherman and caught the great majority of the flathead that were in the holes at the time that he fished them, but the average abundance recovered a great deal quicker than he thought. For many years I have fished north coast beaches for flathead and made consistently good catches day after day in the same general locations. I believe there is no doubt that what I caught one day had an impact of what I would catch from the same series of holes on the next day. But I still had a lot of excellent fishing on the same beach at least two or three days in a row, even in more recent years when there were numerous other fishermen chasing flathead on the same beach with soft plastics.
I also well remember one day in the late 1960s when Dad and I were fishing separate holes about 300 yards apart on the south beach at Kingscliff. We had fished the run-out tide and each caught three or four flathead from our respective holes. We met in the middle and agreed we had caught what flathead were in those holes but that we would return to them and hope that a few bream would come in on the tide that had just turned. An hour of the run-in tide and flathead turned up in almost unbelievable numbers. We caught more than twenty each before we gave it away, and they were still biting, virtually every throw in the end. The dusky flathead populations on and just offshore from ocean beaches in northern NSW were a great deal larger and more mobile than the wisdom from the good old days suggested.