BIG CA TCH FOR CHL OE

CHLOE Bauer took four days maternity leave from the family’s Bowen Fisherman’s Seafood Company just recently and what did she do?

She went fishing for spanish mackerel. She can fillet a 21kg spanish, like the one pictured, down to 130g slices faster that you can say “holy mackerel” … well, just about.

She unloaded one tonne of spanish mackerel last weekend and all of it is being sold through the fish shop adjacent to the processing shed at the Bowen Marina. If you are in Bowen and you want to taste mackerel like you’ve never tasted it before, go there.

Chloe is about to have a little boy and, yes, he will be a fisho. It was preordained in the stars. She said someone had told her that if you read books about certain occupations to the unborn child, the message will be absorbed into the mind and presto, 20 years later you’ve got a road train driver, a brain surgeon or a Donald Trump in the family, depending on the books you read while he, she or whatever was in utero. Chloe did one better than that. She took her unborn little feller out one of the family mackerel boats for four days of fishing. Guess what he’ll doing when he’s 20?

He’ll either be the tackle shop baron of North Queensland, the mackerel king of the Coral Coast or the best fish filleter the world has ever seen. A name hasn’t been decided yet. I looked up the name of the patron god of fishermen.

It is Glaucus. Don’t know how that would go down.