Every Sunday from about 1975 until his knees gave out, my granddad Col took his old tinnie up Cabbage Tree Creek with four pots and a frozen mullet. From the time I was six I went with him. He taught me to read the tide off the mangrove roots, to tell a buck from a jenny by the flap, and to never, ever keep an undersized crab "just this once".
I ended up turning that into a career. I spent twelve years as a Boating & Fisheries Patrol officer, checking eskies and measuring crabs from Bribie down to the Gold Coast Seaway. Most people I pulled up weren't trying to break the rules. Nobody had ever shown them how. Hire places would hand over a boat and four pots with no gauge, no tags and no idea.
In 2021 Merv, who'd run the boat hire on Allpass Parade since the '90s, decided he was done. I bought his shed, six tired tinnies and his phone number, re-floored the boats and put new four-strokes on every one. Then I built the business I wished existed when I was writing tickets: tinnies that come with properly rigged, tagged pots, a real briefing, and someone who'll ring you the night before to say "come an hour earlier, the low's moved."
We're a small crew, we're tide-obsessed, and we still measure every crab at the dock. Come and see us.
— Bec Tunstall, owner & skipper
