Cape York : A Haven for Anglers Among Perils of Australia’s Northern Wilderness

First the bad news, about fishing on the top of Australia:

--There are snakes there . . . snakes so poisonous they make American rattlesnakes seem like bees. We’re talking 11-foot-long snakes that can kill you in 20 minutes.

--There are also saltwater crocodiles there, or salties as Aussies like to call them. Salties have been reported to stand on their hind legs and pull human beings down out of trees. A couple of years ago, a couple of biologists in a small plane flew over a crocodile and couldn’t believe their eyes. Circling back for another look, they estimated its length at 28 feet.

Now, the good news: Cape York Wilderness Lodge.

The northern tip of the York Peninsula, the northernmost point of Australia’s land mass, is an improbable place to find fine wine, gourmet seafood and comfortable lodging, in one of the world’s last remaining unspoiled wilderness areas.

Yet fishermen, bird watchers, wildlife photographers and people who just enjoy the rain-forest experience have been flying north from Australia’s major cities to reach Cape York ever since 1986, when Air Queensland, which owns 3,600 acres of Cape York area land--including the cape itself--opened its $1.2 million lodge, half a mile’s hike from Cape York itself.

Light tackle spin or saltwater fly fishermen are only a short walk from the shallow waters of Frangipani Beach, where the Coral Sea meets the Torres Strait. They can also use lodge aluminum skiffs (Aussies call them tinnies ) to ride the mile or so to a small island off the cape, York Island.

Jacks, barracuda, Spanish mackerel, wahoo, an occasional wayward dogtooth tuna, queenfish, dorado, giant trevally and a heavyweight bottom fish called a Maori wrasse are all caught in the region’s waters.

But most Australian and American fishermen come to Cape York in search of Australia’s most popular game fish, the barramundi. A cousin of the snook, barramundi are found in brackish waters near river mouths. If you can imagine what a 60-pound largemouth bass on 20- or 30-pound test line would feel like, you have a rough idea of what draws barramundi fishermen to Cape York and the dozens of other river mouths on the 500-mile-long York Peninsula.

Gary Wright, who runs the fishing program at Cape York Wilderness Lodge, runs an outpost fisherman’s camp near the mouth of the Jardine River, about a three-hour drive from the main lodge.

“Most of the people we’ve taken on two- and three-day fishing trips to the Jardine all said they’d want to come back,” Wright said. “Most of the remote rivers on the York Peninsula have excellent barramundi fishing, and the Jardine is as good as any. We catch them up to 60 pounds.

“The best times are just before and just after our rainy seasons, or from October to late December, and from March to early May.”

Barramundi fishing is similar to largemouth bass fishing--fishermen drift or use trolling motors to cruise the river sides, casting lures and plugs tight to mangrove roots, where barramundi lurk, waiting for prey species to swim past.

Some of the river mouths of the York Peninsula, even today, are largely unexplored by light tackle fishermen. The reason: There is virtually no pavement anywhere on the York Peninsula. Four-wheel-drive caravans need three days to drive the length of the peninsula. Compared to the York Peninsula’s roads, the Baja Highway looks like the San Diego Freeway.

Fishermen, of course, will endure almost any hardship to reach the kind of fishing the peninsula offers. Some have called it the world’s best light tackle fishing. California writer Tony Pena was astonished early one morning, on a 1985 trip, at the density of marine life on a trip to the Jardine with Wright.

At a small boat dock near the Jardine’s mouth, he described the spectacular sight of a 70-pound giant trevally not only surfacing but leaping free of the water, chasing small jacks.

“And I watched this from the dock,” Pena wrote for California Angler magazine, “I had yet to step from the dock into the boat!”

Flight to Bamaga.

Most travelers headed for Cape York now fly out of Cairns, the Queensland coastal city known as the “Marlin Capital of the World,” for its proximity to the black marlin waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

The small plane flies low at first, over the Queensland coast, providing passengers with impressive views of some huge reefs in the Great Barrier Reef system. Crossing over the coast, the flight pattern becomes due north, over Queensland’s remote rain forests.

The four-hour flight to Bamaga, Australia’s northernmost town, will include two other stops. The Sunbird Airlines flight lands first at Badu Island, midway across the 100-mile-wide Torres Strait, separating Australia from Papua New Guinea.

One passenger departs and one climbs aboard at the island’s dirt strip. Next is a 10-minute flight to Horn Island, where some scientific instruments are unloaded.

Bamaga’s Jacky Jacky Airfield was once called Higgins Field, when the 10,000-foot runway was built by the Seabees in 1942. The field was bombed by the Japanese early in the war but later was a base from which U.S. and Australian planes launched the first bombing raids upon Japanese installations in the Torres Strait, Papua and Southern Dutch New Guinea.

During the war, the strip was turned over to the Royal Australian Air Force. Today, the dusty little terminal building, a home for numerous spiders, is where adventurous light tackle fishermen are greeted.

Visitors are met by lodge personnel, who drive them on the 65-minute trip to the lodge. It’s an unforgettable journey, through rain-forest habitat so dense in places that a daytime darkness descends upon the road, and one can’t see three feet into the forest.

Most amazing are towering cathedral fig trees, with immense, buttressed trunks, looking as if they’d been sculpted by an artist centuries ago. In clearings, where twisty eucalyptus trees dominate, another unique York Peninsula phenomenon occurs--huge, fluted anthills, some of them 25-feet high. They’re everywhere in the region--including the islands of the Torres Strait--looking like silent, red sentries.

The textbooks say a tropical rain forest is a place where such conditions as rainfall and drainage for plant growth are not just favorable, but optimum. Here, rainfall is not only optimum, but almost overwhelming. In some rainy seasons, rainfall on the York Peninsula measures 8 to 12 feet .

Here, it’s life gone amok. Everywhere, something grows. There are even plants growing on plants. And some, like cancer, kill. The strangler vine attaches itself to healthy trees, then slowly extends tentacles around the tree’s trunk and limbs. Over a period of years, the vine eventually kills the tree.

Visitors are always reminded of the peninsula’s dangers, such as salties.

“When you’re out of a boat and walking anywhere near water, you want to be light on your feet if you see mounds of dirt and vegetation,” Wright said.

“That’s a salty’s nest, and one’s likely to be about, protecting eggs.”

Of course, you’re not out of harm’s way away from water, either. Saltwater crocs have been seen in Australia 100 miles from the nearest water.

And then there’s the snake of your worst nightmare, the taipan. A snake book in the lodge library points out that the most lethal snake venom in the world is that of the Australian tiger snake.

However, tiger snakes seldom are more than 2 to 3 feet long. The taipan’s venom is slightly less lethal, but because of its much greater size (particularly the size of its venom glands), it’s considered more dangerous.

Even more distressing, according to the snake book, the taipan is “lightning-quick.”

In other words, you’re most likely a goner if you’re bitten by either one. But with the tiger, your odds are slightly better.

You never know when you’ll confront one of the rain forest’s fearsome-looking creatures. One sticks to a regular appearance schedule. “Jeffrey” shows up every day at lunchtime at the lodge, and frightens guests who are having their first patio buffet lunch.

Jeffrey is a three-foot-long monitor lizard, who in two quick steps, rushes toward you in a kind of skittering charge. He stops, to hiss loudly until you jump up, drop your silverware, and run away, screaming. But it’s all for show.

All Jeffrey wants is his midday hot dog. On cue, someone appears from the kitchen, tosses Jeffrey his frankfurter, and off he goes into the jungle, as happy as a monitor lizard.

“He came around one day when the place first opened,” explained a lodge kitchen employee. “Someone gave him a hot dog, and he was a fast learner. He’s been back for lunch every day since then.”

During the rainy season (Aussies call it the wet ), Cape York Wilderness Lodge often has guests who come to listen to the rain. Honest.

“You can’t adequately describe what that kind of rainfall sounds like at night, on the cottage tin roofs,” Wright said. “Really, some people love being up here when it rains all the time.”

For sunny-weather visitors, York Island is a pleasant, easy excursion. It rises from the sea not quite a mile off the tip of Cape York, a dot on the map above the 500-mile peninsula. The island is a favored surf-fishing site. Visitors who use a skiff to cross the channel between the island and the cape to toss lures, often find sea turtle tracks on the beach, left by egg-laying females.

The little uninhabited island can also be a place of solitude, a place to beachcomb, to snooze in the sand, or to climb the island’s peak to gaze upon a nation’s tip.

It’s a wild, primitive place, and it looks pretty much the way it did in 1770, when Capt. James Cook passed by, on the Endeavour.

Australians are hopeful the York Peninsula, primarily because of its inaccessibility, will remain a wild, natural place for generations.

“We’ve (Australians) fouled up a lot of wild areas in our country in the past,” Wright said. “But this place is so hard to get to, I think it will be protected just by the geography for a long time. We keep hearing about timber companies wanting to get in here, and of course we hope that never happens.

“The fishing should be very good for a long time. There isn’t much commercial fishing activity around here--it’s just too far away from the country’s larger ports.”