For reasons not understood by me I have had writers block for this final episode of Travel Season 2025. I thought maybe I would just keep it short and simple:
Australia—it was epic. The End.
Perhaps it is knowing that finishing this piece means that the passport, rod tube and duffel bag are put away for the year? Maybe it’s simply too hard to put into words just how special Cape York turned out to be?
I tried to get AI to help me. This was a theme of the Cape York trip. I came home as educated on artificial intelligence as Anak permit, thanks to Cooper the most technologically savvy guide I have ever fished with. But after opening the last article with the sentence “Trout Suck”, I am afraid I might be on thin ice with the Winston editorial team.
Olivia, the one with most of the good ideas in our house, told me to go back and read the other two posts to try and get the creative juices flowing. More often than not she is right, so I did.
Puerto Rico and Christmas Island seem like distant memories at this point.
I have flown 35000 miles since I first left for San Juan but I was easily taken back to both of these places as I reread the articles. The gritty feeling of battling tarpon amongst piers in Salinas and the joy of watching those new to the sport find such thrills in their first saltwater experience at a place like CXI. Those two experiences were easy to jot down. The stories wrote themselves as the trip unfolded. I think it happened that way because of familiarity. Although Puerto Rico was new, tarpon are not and though I am not a saltwater guide, I have shared the experience of a first steelhead, a fish that forever changes you, with many clients. This familiarity takes nothing away from either of those fisheries or experiences. I would not change either trip and I hope to go back many times to both of those fisheries. With familiarity comes ease, in this case ease of story telling.
However, Cape York, Australia was different. Josh Hutchins of Aussie Fly Fisher has created a program at Cape York that is unlike any other I have experienced in saltwater fly fishing. Their new mothership allows anglers to access a completely unpressured fishery. The fishing was incredible. Schools of mooning Anak permit, the consistent presence of large golden trevally and queenfish and the smorgasbord of mangrove species eager to eat a fly ensured there was never a lull in the action. However, it was unknown constellations at night, saltwater crocodiles, pythons finding refuge on our boat, giant pet Queensland Grouper and kangaroos and dingos on the beaches that’s kept Cape York so brilliantly alive in my mind. Although the rods, reels and lines were the same as Puerto Rico and Christmas Island, hardly anything felt familiar. The novelty of species and experiences, epic fishing and raw power of Cape York has me counting down the days until I go back.
Cape York stretches out like something prehistoric—remote, wild and full of life. As you cruise north in the skiff you are significantly closer to Papua New Guinea than you are a town of 10,000 people. Tuna, generally considered to be an offshore species, crush bait a few hundred yards off the beach in relatively shallow water. In the mangroves you find countless species that, at first glance, feel familiar—until a closer looks reminds you that you’re fishing on the other side of the planet. The seemingly endless beach-side flats and river mouth sand bars stretch out as if unfettered by the laws of physics. Each one of them with the potential of producing the the fish we travelled so far to find—the Anak permit.
Anak permit are the crown jewel of Cape York’s flats.
Their golden yellow fins outlined in ink black and blunt noses distinguish them from their Caribbean cousins. If your goal is to check off the Big Four permit species, Australia is the only place to find the Anak on the flats, and Cape York is the epicenter of Australian permit fishing. Here Anak permit travel in schools that can number twenty or more. During my two week stay aboard the mothership I twice saw schools of permit numbering more than 30 fish. These were not “belt buckles” or even “smediums” but schools of permit ranging from 10-20 pounds. I heard tales and saw videos of permit numbered in the hundreds mooning across white sand flats. A scene—so unfamiliar to me—it could only be witnessed at a fishery virtually untouched by humans so its fish act as they have since long before the British sent the first convict to this faraway land. Every day brought each boat great shots at permit and on multiple occasions I watched as my friends landed two or more permit in a day of fishing. Unfamiliar.
Anak permit have a reputation for being “honest.”
They aren’t easy—no permit ever is—but if you make the cast, get the angle right, and get the fly to the BOTTOM, they’ll eat. It’s a surreal blend of quantity and quality, stitched together by a consistency that feels almost impossible. Watching a dozen broad, golden-backed fish float effortlessly along a beachside flat, waiting for the tide to flood a sandbar, is enough to make you believe that you have found the fly fishing Shangri-La. Perhaps Cape York is just that, or perhaps as the chart plotter on the skiffs read, it’s really a “Permey Dreamland”?
Permit are far from the only species that one can target on the fly.
Over the two weeks we caught 21 different species of fish in the diverse habitats found at Cape York. Big golden trevally, queenfish and GTs hunt the same flats as the Anaks, offering fast paced action requiring an angler at the stern of the boat to always be ready with a second rod. In the tidal rivers, casts along the mangrove roots were rewarded with a wide variety of species including Indo-pacific tarpon, barramundi and mangrove jacks, all of which looked vaguely familiar but that were uniquely Australian. At low tide in the very back of the tidal rivers there was a species of fish that was so unique, so different than anything I have ever seen, it immediately became the mascot of our adventure—the mudskipper.
Mudskippers, a species of goby, are more comfortable on land than they are in water.
Able to absorb oxygen through their skin, they hunt prey on the mangrove lined mudflats, a sight best narrated by Sir David Attenborough. For anyone who’s ever cast too far at a target, mudskippers are the perfect quarry. A cast as far up the mudflat as possible, followed by a few short, erratic strips, was often met with a violent strike from these salamander-sculpin hybrids. The trouble was that on a 9-weight rod with a 2/0 fly, a four-ounce fish is almost impossible to pin. More often than not, the fish would desperately hold onto the fly as it was pulled across the mud, only to finally drop it just before it was pulled into the water. A fish more comfortable on land than at sea, definitely not something any of us were familiar with. Maybe a 3wt Air 2 Max for 2026?
If there is a symbol of the Cape York fishery it has to be the saltwater crocodile.
Prehistoric and unchanged for millions of years. They are everywhere on The Cape and the guides aboard the mothership were quick to give all of us a croc safety speech and even quicker to reprimand you if you did not follow it to the letter of the law. Although I never felt unsafe, fishing a place with a predator that would happily and easily eat you was absolutely unfamiliar to an angler from the rather benign Pacific Northwest. Each and every time we stepped out of the skiff to photograph and release a fish, one person was assigned to “croc watch”—a job taken only half in jest. We got out of the boat a lot over two weeks to photograph fish and it was just as strange a feeling on day 12 as it was on day 1.
Every morning, drinking coffee and watching the sun rise over Cape York, I sat contemplating what discovery would greet me on the flats that day.
Would it be a new behavior from a wall of Anak permit sliding across a sandbar? Perhaps I would finally see the infamous 50+ fish school of meter long Geets? Or maybe be it would be another session of watching mudskippers skittering across the banks like creatures that forgot which branch of the evolutionary tree they belonged on? Nothing ever felt routine, nothing ever felt familiar—and that was the beauty of it. Cape York is a place that resists easy description, it humbles and amazes in equal measure. As much as I try to capture it in words, the simple truth is: a fishery this wild and untouched can only begin to be appreciated in person. One must smell the red dirt, see the mooning permit and feel the sense of being in the middle of the food chain. In the end Australia truly was epic. Only 265 days until I return.
The permit of Cape York demand that your crab be on the bottom.
With the heavy currents along the tidal rivers this required extremely heavy crabs and 15’ intermediate tips. The 8’6” 9wt Air 2 Max shined at delivering this setup. Its shorter length and stiffer tip maintained accuracy on every length cast made from the bow of the skiff. For the mangroves the 9’ 9wt with a floating line and small brush fly was perfect for keeping a long list of species out of the roots once hooked. And until Winston perfects the 3wt Air 2 Max it will continue to be my mudskipper rod as well.
Four weeks in the salt is hard on gear. But Travel Season Goes on with the AIR 2 MAX.
I saw the 12wt so bent under the weight of a cobia that destruction seemed imminent—but it just kept lifting. These are light rods with amazing feel but they are powerful and strong as well. Between Puerto Rico, Christmas Island and Cape York I saw no less than a half dozen broken rods from different manufactures. I loaned out my Air 2 Max rods to experienced anglers as well as those brand new to the flats and not one came back broken. Simply put, they are everything you could ask for in a salt water rod. They are stashed for the season.
Leaving Permey Dreamland for what i know best—steelhead rivers.
Soon enough I will be bundled up in too many layers to count enjoying watching beads of water drip of the hood of my rain jacket. In the back of my mind I will be replaying the adventures I have had this year and reminding myself that each day brings me one day closer to Travel Season 2026.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
From the time he was four, in home-made waders crafted of trash bags, rain pants, rubber boots & duct tape…a lot of duct tape…Alex Gonsiewski has chased fish all over his home state of Oregon. After finishing his degree in Ecology at Oregon State, he started guiding summers and quickly transitioned into making this his full time career. Fifteen years later, he has settled in Sisters, Oregon and continues to guide steelhead on the Deschutes, John Day and north Oregon coast rivers. As a photographer he enjoys capturing the moments between fish (there can be a lot of these as a steelhead guide), the memories that define our sport far beyond what is caught. Outside of the steelhead season he can be found hosting groups of anglers to destinations around the world and perhaps helping them escape a war zone, but that is a story best told over beer.
