[Previous entry: "FIRST OUTBACK TRAVELS ...... a holiday from the sea"] [Next entry: "(the) SICK GIANT GROPER ...... This photo by Bob Sands"]
26/11/2006: "GIANT QUEENSLAND GROPER ...... How Bob Sands saved one"
It doesn't always happen as above. Due to unclear circumstances a less fortunate groper (or grouper if you prefer) ended up quite sick in captivity perhaps to to rough handling by fishermen. Bob Sands remembers:
"A bunch of fisherman netted the 2.7 meter grouper off Hat Head and sold it to the former marine park at Port Macquarie.
I had already photographed this fish off Black Rock a couple of months earlier. I could tell it was the same fish because of the split in the lower part of the tail.
When I learned about it, I took a reporter from a newspaper along. Looking over the edge into the tiny tank, I was shocked to see that the water so shallow, the grouper was rubbing along the bottom with dorsal fins exposed into the summer sun.
I made a complaint, got whacked on the side of the head and thrown bodily out of the establishment. Not a good start.
So the newspaper called the NSW State Fisheries Department. Up comes their top man along with a 60-Minutes film crew and star TV journalist George Negus.
Reluctantly they let me get into the pool to photograph the fish underwater. This poor fish was tortured. He had rubbed many of the scales off his belly and hit the concrete walls so often that he had torn his once bright billiard-ball sized eyes out of their sockets.
Upshot was the owner was ordered to release the fish.
So he intended to anesthetize it and simply release it into the nearby river which could have resulted with it rolling along the bottom in the outgoing tide like a boiled cabbage.
The State Fisheries officer said it would certainly die because it was badly injured and could not navigate home. He recommended that it be transported back to where it was captured.
With help I put the fish into a big cheese vat and drove it back to Hat Head.
Before we had a chance to put it back into the creek, the park owner gave it a couple of monster squirts of an anesthetic into the gills.
We walked the now very sick fish along Hat Head saltwater creek for about three hours.
We eventually discovered that if we clanked the jaw up and down, this would pump water across the gills. It came around and eventually was strong enough to swim unaided.
Although now blinded, the fish was navigating familiar territory. I swam over the top of him as he headed out toward Fish Rock.
I went about half a mile with him. He was swimming strongly when I last saw him disappear into the depths and out of sight.
About a year later, some local divers sighted him again, same split tail.
Still blind but doing OK".
That is a true story for your blog, the best repository for such a tale.
I sold a version to Readers’ Digest who paid enough to buy a professional dive boat which I named after my wife, Eva.
When people later asked what plans I had for the weekend, I would answer that I was spending it with Eva. (Robert 'Bob' Sands)
