12-Sep-2024 -- Merimbula NSW 2548

This confluence is sadly but pleasantly the last unvisited point in New South Wales. I never thought that someday we will have the chance to visit this one since it is on the Tasman Sea and a thousand kilometre away. Until one day, my first cousins from Vietnam decided to visit their cousin in the far away land of Australia with a request to go fishing somewhere along the coast from Sydney to Melbourne. We chose Merimbula.

The confluence is actually closer to Eden (around 11 km) than Merimbula (14 km) but we put our bet on Merimbula with hope that the Merimbula Bay will be calmer for fishing even on an early spring windy day. I contacted and chartered a fishing boat our ourselves with three missions: fishing, seeing the whale and visiting the confluence.

We met Scott Deveril, a local boatman at Mitchies Jetty, Merimbula on the fateful morning at 7 am sharp. It was cloudy but otherwise quiet and cool morning. The espresso bar on the jetty was opened by two guys, apparently Scott’s mates. There were a few early anglers, probably tourists, and an old lady just went for a chilly swim!

We ‘’sailed’’ toward the confluence first, because it is the furthest target while searching for whales and scouting to assess the weather. The waves got bigger when we left the Merimbula bar (a sandy indentation, lying between Haycock and Merimbula Points). We all took Kwell seasick tablets before boarding to save Scott from cleaning the deck. The boat rode the waves one by one, and we got up in the air once in a while (more like every 2 minutes). The dark clouds started to gather, and rain swung in from all direction. We arrived at the confluence after 45 minutes. Scotty believed that the fishing trip was ruined by the rain and the wind, so he tried hard to accomplish the only feasible goal today: get all the zeros on the GPS device of his boat. He turned around and around and around, but the wind made it impossible. However, after 1001 photos I took, finally I found 1 that recorded 37°00.000’ 150°00.002’. I got another one from my handheld device, not so closed, but good enough for the successful visit.

We turned around and stop in Merimbula Bay for the last effort of catching something. And suddenly we saw… a whale. A baby one, but it did come off the water and blew water in the air. We finally caught a small flathead at 8:45 am and thought that was the time to head back to shore. Well, ironically, we did complete all the missions listed at the start of the trip even though they are all very minor successes (luckily except for the confluence!).

We said goodbye to Scott and hope to see him next time we are in town. Then we endured the next two days of rain and hail all the way to Lake Entrances where we caught another 6 small crabs!

In the Tasman Sea, but with a view of land.