Media report says that regulation allows commercial fishing licence to net yellowbelly at Lake Hope and Red Lake on his 5600sq km Mulka Station. Grazier Garry Overton, a fisherman, has the licence and catched 4-5 tonnes of yellowbelly per week, which is trucked to Adelaide. Ice is hauled back on the return trip. He says people give stanrge looks on the Birdsville Track when you’re hauling big Canadian ice boxes, with a commercial fishing licence written on the side.
His licence is twenty years old but so rarely does the desert country get water that the cow cocky has become a professional fisherman just three times. He informed that there is a huge stock of fish here and the numbers are growing. Lake Eyre, 120km away, is at 60 per cent capacity and unusually has held water continuously for the past four years.
Report says that it is nothing but miracles of the inland, some of the water that starts as rain in northern Australia flows into the lakes after a two-month, 1300km course. Along the way, fish surviving in remote billabongs spawn, sending millions of offspring down through the rivers.
Wrightsair owner Trevor Wright, based at nearby William Creek, said there si good chance of Lake Eyre to be boosted again in the next two months because Cooper Creek and the Thomson, Diamantina, Warrego, Burke, Georgina and Bulloo rivers were in minor to moderate flood. Under normal, drier conditions, such floods would not reach Lake Eyre.
According to Overton overflow from Queensland rainfall may reach the lakes by about June, closing the Birdsville Track. The South Australian Government tightly controls the fishing.
