“You should see the one that got away!” is a cliched joke when it comes to fishing.
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But you can’t help wondering about the one that got away in Jeff Hood’s yarn, when you see the size of the four that didn’t get away. Because, Jeff Hood says, “Number five got away!”
Jeff featured in the Sunday Telegraph’s ‘Your favourite photos’ section last year. Jeff’s son, Bruce, submitted the photo of Jeff and his mates to the Sunday Telegraph as a birthday surprise for his father.
It surprised a lot of other local people, too, when they saw four men dressed in their Sunday best lined up in Wingham’s Central Park, each holding a gigantic mulloway (commonly called Jewfish), in a photo from the late 1950s.
The four fish were caught by Jeff and his mate, John Lamont, a long-line fisherman from Taree. They caught two each.
“We caught them at Brighton (now Manning Point). We tied the boat up to the big wall. Johnny knew they were there. It was Easter time, when the fish were travelling, see,” Jeff says.
We lived on fish for breakfast, lunch and tea, lots of times!
- Judy Hoppe
“Anyway we tied the boat up and we got some live bait put on these 50 pound breaking lines, and I tell you what, they weren’t on the bottom very long before some of these fellas were onto it!”
“Johnny, when we caught them Saturday night, he wanted to weigh them in for the biggest fish. But we said where are going to get somebody to hold them? He was in the Wingham Fishing Club and I said, ‘well I’ll go and see Veitch at the real estate at the Top Pub. Veitch said ‘yeah, I’ll help you, Jeff’.”
The pair took the catch to Wingham to be weighed the next morning – the smallest was 32 pounds and the biggest was 52.
The other two in the photo were Veitch Murray, who owned a real estate in Wingham, and Jock Witchard, the proprietor of a Wingham sports store.
Jeff moved to Taree when he was in his thirties and set up a one-man real estate agency. He started fishing around 10 years later.
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“We had a 14-foot boat we used to row down there and put it in. We used to go down Saturday night. We came home with 90 fish one night,” Jeff says.
“We lived on fish for breakfast, lunch and tea, lots of times!” Jeff’s daughter, Judy Hoppe says.
Now 94 and the only one left living of the four in the picture, Jeff hasn’t hung up his fishing line yet. And he reckons the mulloway would still be there.
Now he favours Old Bar for his angling opportunities.
“Old Bar has been good but that’s closed off (Mud Bishops). So we’re waiting for the weather to improve. Hardly anybody fishing,” Jeff says.