BUGGER FEEDING THE NATION

Take the Easy Road and Start a Charter Business

Apparently, salvation has arrived. Forget battling quotas, share prices, marine park closures, and the endless stack of DPI paperwork. Forget the decades of family history tied up in nets, licenses, and boats that were paid off in blood and barnacles. The answer, my fellow fishers, is simple: just give up and run charters.

That’s right. One bloke up north has cracked the code. He’s “done fighting” to keep his commercial fishing business alive. Too hard, too stressful, too regulated. So he sold the dream and bought the fantasy: a shiny new charter boat. Now he’s living on “easy street.”

Easy street, of course, being the road paved with:

• Endless insurance premiums, because nothing says “fun” like strangers suing you for slipping on deck.

• 4:00am wake-up calls from blokes who rock up late with an esky full of warm beer and not a clue how to hold a rod.

• Spending more time untangling lines than actually fishing.

• Listening to Barry from Bankstown explain, for the seventh time, how he “nearly went pro” after landing a flathead once in 1989.

• Re-tying rigs that your paying customers donate to the reef at a rate of $30 per snag.

But hey — easy street! No more worries about the price of fish at the co-op, no stress about closures, no fights with regulators. Just the pure joy of explaining to a group of tourists why they paid $300 a head to catch undersized bream all day.

Meanwhile, back in reality, commercial fishers still slog away trying to feed the country, juggling costs and compliance that would make an accountant cry. But why bother with that noble nonsense? Why put local seafood on Aussie plates when you can put a cold sausage roll and a bottle of Bundy into the hands of Darren, who booked a “boys weekend charter” and hasn’t stopped vomiting since Broken Bay?

So yes, mates — let’s all just quit. Sell the nets, mothball the trawlers, and roll out the red carpet for charter tourism. After all, Australia doesn’t really need Australian seafood, right? We just need more Instagram shots of drunk blokes holding barely legal snapper.

Who knew survival in the fishing game was this simple? The easy road is open, all aboard. Just remember to pack seasick tablets, a sense of humour, and your lawyer’s number.