Prawn to be wild

WORDS by Sara Mulcahy

A full moon over Port Douglas is a special sight. Every 29.5 days, it emerges from the ocean, casting a bright trail across the water.  Sometimes it seems impossibly close, hanging low and large to the east over Four Mile Beach, before making its way up and across the night sky. To the locals, this magical sight means something quite practical, too, the prawn boat’s coming in.

“Prawns generally only come out at night, and the darker the night, the easier they are to catch,” says Laurie Moull, owner of Santiego Seafoods (it’s named after his first boat) and skipper of the prawn trawler, Diamond Lil.

“When the moon gets bigger and brighter, it lights up the night, and they don't come out. They bury themselves in the sand or go deeper into the darker water. So that’s when we bring the boat in,” he says.

Laurie, his wife, Tracey, and his crew drop anchor at the public jetty (behind St Mary’s church) roughly once a month. From 7 am (8 am on Sundays), they sell their wild, fresh tiger and endeavour prawns off the back deck of the trawler, along with an unpredictable ‘bycatch’ of bugs, scallops, squid, cuttlefish, octopus and blue swimmer crabs.

“Twenty-odd years ago, I decided to sell direct to the public,” says Laurie. “And people love it. I mean, they get a premium product straight off the boat that caught it, froze it and cooked it, at cheaper prices than you’d pay in a shop. 

Some people are down there at 4.30 in the morning. We get there at 6.30 am and they're already lined up. We have people who message us from England to find out when the boat’s in, and they book their holidays around it.”

“We hear so many stories,” adds Tracey. “Someone will be here from New Zealand, and they’ll say, Oh, our friends told us about this six months ago when they came over here. It's great. It is. It's a good feeling.”

Santiego Seafoods was started by Laurie’s parents, Bill and Julie, who arrived in Port Douglas from England by way of Melbourne in 1972.

“They started travelling up the coast, stopping along the way and staying in a few different places. They got on a boat in Cairns that took them around to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and that’s when Dad started fishing. He was an engineer by trade, with no background in fishing — he just sort of gave it a go. He liked the adventure,” says Laurie. 

When Bill and Julie and their young family arrived, Port Douglas was a fishing town, with more than 20 trawlers based here. Today, the Diamond Lil is the only one.

Laurie and Tracey run the business together. Laurie’s son, Axl, is in training to take over as skipper, accompanying his dad for the three out of four weeks that the boat is at sea. (“I’m not good on boats,” Tracey says sheepishly.)

Father and son fish the waters from the Whitsundays to the south, up to the Torres Strait Line in the north. 

“I think on the whole East Coast now, there are about 430 licenses,” says Laurie. “Back when I first bought my boat, there were more than 1400.”

Over the years, the Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries has worked together with the fishermen to reduce the amount of catch, to make it sustainable. 

“I want everything we have now, and what we had in the past, to be there for the future,” says Laurie. “So we do backflips through all the hoops we've got to go through.”

One of the ecological imperatives is to stop other sea life becoming trapped in the prawn nets. Diamond Lil is fitted with turtle excluder devices (known as TEDs), which are designed to help turtles swim out of fishing nets if they’re accidentally caught. A TED comprises a rigid barrier grid attached to the circumference of the net, which guides lost turtles towards an escape hole either above or below. 

“When the TED first became mandatory in 2000, people were jumping up and down, saying they're letting the prawns out, but within a couple of years, we’d perfected it,” says Laurie. “If I had a choice, I wouldn’t go fishing without it now because it's so much safer. If you get monsters — that’s anything big or heavy like sharks and stingrays — in the net, they squash all your prawns. And then you've got to deal with it and get it over the side before it gets you!”

The Diamond Lil catches more prawns than Port Douglas can swallow — literally, but the whole catch is sold in the local area between Cairns and the Daintree.

If you’re not here when the boat docks, you can sample her wild-caught cargo at many venues around town, including Port Seafood and Marano’s service stations; or you can sample them off the menu at the Surf Club, the Beach Shack, the Tin Shed, Salsa Bar and Grill, and more.

If you’re lucky enough to join the queue at the jetty, pack an Esky with a kilo of cooked prawns, some creamy tartare sauce and a chilled bottle of bubbles, and watch the full moon rise over the palms at Rex Smeal Park.